Tucker Carlson commented on his feud with Ben Shapiro, Mark Levin, and other Israel-boosters in the Republican Party, making the case that the issue is really about Iran. “For those who were hesitant to get into another regime-change war, it’s intimidating. Because you’re happy to have a debate any time of day about what’s in the interest of the United States… and you’d probably win that debate because there’s no evidence that any regime-change war we’ve engaged in in the past couple of generations has helped us. Everyone kind of knows that,” Carlson said. “But if you make it a debate about ‘Why do you hate the Jews?’ then most people are going to opt out. Most of them don’t hate the Jews-no evidence that they do-but nobody wants to be tried as a bigot.” “So very few people pushed back. Very few. In fact, as far as I know, only two people-me and Charlie Kirk-actually went and spoke directly to the president to make the case that no, you shouldn’t get involved in this war,” Carlson said.

TUCKER CARLSON: Pretty much every morning you wake up and open your phone and think to yourself, I wonder if this roiling fight on the right is still ongoing. The fight over who’s a Nazi, who’s Nazi-adjacent, who should be platformed, and who should be deplatformed. That fight, the one that has mesmerized X users across the world. What is that fight actually about, and how long will it continue? The first thing to know about it is that it didn’t start three weeks ago with Nick Fuentes’s appearance on a podcast. No, this has been a fight taking place mostly behind the scenes since January. And that tells you a lot about what it’s actually about. Here’s how it began. Donald Trump, inaugurated January 22nd of this year. Almost immediately after, he is visited at the White House by the first head of state to come to Washington: the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu. And the visit is not simply a congratulatory visit. They’re not actually allies in any sense. Remember that Benjamin Netanyahu was one of the very first to congratulate Joe Biden after the 2020 election. So there’s probably not a lot of warmth there-just guessing. No, there was a purpose to the visit and the subsequent visits by the prime minister of Israel to Washington. And that was to get American support for a regime-change war in Iran-to overthrow and replace the government of Iran, which the nation of Israel sees as its primary regional threat. Iran has all kinds of very dangerous conventional weapons. The United States spends a lot protecting Israel from those missiles. And Israel is also concerned that at some point Iran will either make or buy a nuclear weapon, leaving Israel no longer the only nuclear-armed nation in the region. So that’s what it’s actually about. And to be honest, you can see from Israel’s point of view: if you’re trying to identify long-term serious threats to you, Iran would be at or near the top of the list, especially since Israel has taken out almost all the other threats. But really, it’s just Iran. The question is: is it in America’s interest to participate in that war? And make no mistake, Israel wouldn’t last three days in a war by itself against Iran-in fact, probably not even 24 hours. Israel’s population centers would be taken out by Iran’s conventional weapons. At that point the Israeli government could either nuke Iran-starting a chain reaction you can’t really predict once it begins-or allow hundreds of thousands of its own citizens, certainly tens of thousands, to be killed. So Israel could not do it alone, and no honest person would suggest that it could. It needs the United States. So the question from the American perspective is: is it good for America to get involved in yet another Israel-inspired regime-change war in the Middle East? There have been quite a few, most notably Iraq. Is that a good idea? And so that debate began. It mostly began behind the scenes. It didn’t peek out into public view very often. But when it did, the people who wanted the regime-change war against Iran almost never admitted what they actually wanted, and they certainly never acknowledged what the debate was actually about. It was about one nation’s interests versus another nation’s interests. Do those interests converge? Are they the same thing? Or are they at odds with each other? I can see why it would be a good idea for Israel to want this. Is it a good idea for us? That’s the debate that never took place. And it didn’t take place because almost from the beginning, the people who wanted regime-change war with Iran made the debate instead about: Why do you hate the Jews? You’re a Nazi. Of course, that was never what the debate was about. Because Israel-the nation of Israel, the one with the parliament, the Knesset, and the military, the IDF, and lots of people and tech firms-is not exclusively Jewish. And it isn’t actually the same as all Jews in the world at all. In fact, there are a lot of Jews around the world who have mixed feelings about Israel or certainly don’t want a regime-change war in Iran. But the people who do want that in the United States-Israel’s proxies in the United States, its defenders, its professional defenders in the U.S., not all of whom are Jewish-were the ones who made the debate, from the first day, Why do you hate the Jews? For those who were hesitant to get into another regime-change war, it’s intimidating. Because you’re happy to have a debate any time of day about what’s in the interest of the United States-when should we project military force, what can we learn from the last 25 years, etc. And you’d probably win that debate because there’s no evidence that any regime-change war we’ve engaged in in the past couple of generations has helped us. Zero evidence. Everyone kind of knows that, including the president. But if you make it a debate about Why do you hate the Jews? then most people are going to opt out. Most of them don’t hate the Jews-no evidence that they do-but nobody wants to be tried as a bigot. And so very few people pushed back. Very few. In fact, as far as I know, only two people-me and Charlie Kirk-actually went and spoke directly to the president to make the case that no, you shouldn’t get involved in this war, because its aim is not actually to deny Iran a nuclear weapon. That may be a virtuous goal, but that’s not really what this is about. What this is about is luring the United States into yet another regime-change war. And if you do that, it’s bad for everybody, including you. That’s the case that we made. Charlie went to the White House to make that case, and God bless him for doing that. And he was hated for doing that. Hated for doing that. But he did it. Very few other people did. In fact, as far as I know, none. So of course in June the debate ended, and the United States did commit military force to Iran. It bombed Iran and spent billions to protect Israel once again from the inevitable, predictable conventional response from Iran. And in the end, thank God, we did not get lured into a regime-change war. But the bitterness lingered, and the total unwillingness of the people pushing for that war to state their aims, to be honest about what they wanted, and to defend what they wanted remained. They understood from the very first day that they could not win that debate. They didn’t want that debate. They wanted another debate-one where they could win, or at least cow their opponents into silence. And that debate was about the Jews, anti-Semitism. Again, this is a country that hasn’t had a lot of anti-Semitism. Decent people are not anti-Semitic. Christians understand that anti-Semitic behavior or attitudes are un-Christian because Christians are universalist in their thinking. Every person has the capacity to come to God through Jesus-every person, no matter how they were born. And so of course no sincere Christian could be an anti-Semite. So this was never about anti-Semitism, despite the fact there are anti-Semites and all kinds of other people in this country. There are 350 million people here. But this debate was not about Jews or anti-Semitism. It was about when to use military force, and to what extent should you follow the lead of a much smaller nation as you think about your own nation. And for a lot of people, this was enormously frustrating, since Donald Trump was elected for the second time last November on a platform that explicitly promised-to help the United States, which is in tough shape and getting worse. And all of a sudden this foreign prime minister shows up and starts hijacking the attention and the money of our country to his ends. And that could be any prime minister, by the way. It happens to have been Benjamin Netanyahu. But conceptually, that’s outrageous. And people were justly upset about it. So where will this go? Well, of course the people who think the U.S. government should act always and everywhere on behalf of its own citizens-the America First people-those people are going to win the debate. In fact, there’s never actually been a real debate. But when people’s mind-fog clears, they’ll understand that this was never about the Jews or anti-Semitism, much less Hitler, who’s been dead for 80 years. It was about: should the United States act in its own interest? Or should it subvert its own interests on behalf of a foreign power with a very effective lobby in Washington? That’s exactly what the debate is. And the answer is of course: no. The America First people are the people who think the government should serve its own citizens-which, let me remind you, is the only legitimate rationale for representative government. If the government is not representing its own citizens, if it doesn’t care about its own citizens, it’s not only off track-it’s illegitimate. It has no basis to govern. They will win. And in a year or two, we’re going to look back on what we’ve been watching for the last month, or the last eight months, and realize this is exactly like BLM or MeToo. At the core there may have been a point, but basically it’s buffoonery. It’s an effort to divert your attention from the real crisis. And we’re going to wonder: since when did the institutional right-conservatives, people who run the think tanks and the magazines nobody reads, the people bloated on Fox News-since when did those people become committed to identity politics and censorship? Because that’s what this is. It’s identity politics. It’s group over nation. It’s another country above our country-a tiny country, an irrelevant country-over our country. And people are going to look at that and say, Wait a second. We voted for you because we thought the two things we could be assured you believed were: you were against identity politics-you lectured us about ‘woke’ for like 10 years-and you were against censorship. Censorship is totally incompatible with democratic government. And suddenly we learn there’s nobody more excited about censorship than a Neocon podcaster or a National Review staffer. They love it. People aren’t going to forget that. And in a year or two or five, we’re going to look back, just as we do on COVID, on the BLM riots, on MeToo, and ask: how did we fall for another moral panic? Another social-media-driven moral panic? How did everyone go insane all at once, denouncing each other and clowning themselves because they were caught up in the moment and couldn’t see they were betraying the very principles they claimed they would die for? Those people are going to feel shame. And many of us will feel contempt for them-more than we already do. So that’s going to happen. They can’t win this debate. It’s not actually a debate. It’s just name-calling. But in the meantime, the rest of us have to listen to an awful lot of a man who, a year ago, was unknown to most Americans-kind of a third-tier podcaster, TV host, or radio host, whatever. A guy who had a weekend show on a cable channel. A guy called Mark Levin.
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