What Does Tucker Carlson Really Believe? I Went to Maine to Find Out.
116 claims analyzed
Transcript(116 claims)
If you find yourself bewildered by this moment where there's so much reason for despair and so much reason to hope all at the same time, let me say I hear you. I'm Ezra Klein from New York Times Opinion, host of the Ezra Klein show. And for me, the best way to beat back that bewildered feeling is to talk it out with the people who have ideas and frameworks for making sense of it. There is going to be plenty to talk about. You can find the Ezra Klein show wherever you get your podcasts.
From The New York Times, this is the interview. I'm Lulu Garcia Navarro. Love him or loathe him, Tucker Carlson has been at the center of our political conversation and conservative media for a decade now. Few other media figures are more closely identified with the Trump era. His massively popular Fox show started just after the twenty sixteen election.
And despite being fired in 2023, Carlson remained a pivotal figure, launching his own network and boosting Trump into a second term on his podcast and in campaign rallies. Then Trump decided to attack Iran alongside Israel, a decision that Carlson is completely opposed to. He now says he regrets supporting the president and has become a vocal and influential critic of the administration. He also blames Israel for making Trump, quote, a slave by, as he characterizes it, pushing the president into war. Those comments and others have led to charges against Carlson of antisemitism.
To understand this break with the president and more, I traveled to Maine to sit down with him. We had a wide ranging conversation about his views on the war, his interview with the white nationalist Nick Fuentes, why he thinks Trump has betrayed his face, and whether he thinks the president is the antichrist, something he's been musing about on his show. But hanging above our whole two part discussion was one central question. Is Carlson's anti Trump conversion permanent, and does it portend a wider cracking of the MAGA base? Here's my interview with Tucker Carlson.
Tucker Carlson. Thanks for having me.
Very excited for you to be here. Thank you. In Maine, we should say. Any any excuse to come to Maine is always a good reason.
Don't come to this part of Maine, so I'm I'm grateful that you did.
It's all parts of Maine are good parts. I wanted to sit down with you for a number of reasons. You've been at the center of conservative media, obviously, for a very long time. By extension, it's politics. And I wanna get your perspective on this moment, on your evolution, your worldview.
You recently made quite a dramatic break with president Trump over the war in Iran, and so I'd love to hear about that. I wanna start though in the lead up to the conflict. You said that you spoke to the president several times about the plan to attack Iran before it actually happened on February 28. I'd love to hear a little bit about that. Was it just you and the president in those meetings?
Can you just give me a sense of what was going on there?
Well, I've been speaking to him about Iran for ten years.
Right.
Literally since 2016, maybe '15, because there was enormous pressure on him as there has been on many presidents to regime change Iran. And we we know based on our experience with a much smaller country, Iraq, that that, you know, that's a tall order, and it doesn't necessarily lead to a place you wanna go, and it's not good for The United States. So anyway and Trump knew that, and that was one of the main reasons, the main reason, actually, that I supported him during, you know, my time at Fox News and campaigned for him. And so it was it was really central to my views of Trump's candidacy and presidency. And so when it became clear in June that we were starting down this road toward a regime change war with Iran, I I was just well, I was baffled.
I was very upset, not because I have allegiance to Iran, but because I thought it would be terrible for The United States as it has been. Worse even than I imagined. But I could see exactly where this was going, and he was under enormous pressure to do this, once again, as as all presidents in my lifetime have been. So we talked a lot in June. He embarked on this effort to take out Iran's nuclear program, which is really just the opening salvo and a regime change effort.
He knew that. I told him that. Charlie Kirk told him that. We did it. We got out.
And then it became clear this winter, in January, that we were really we were moving toward this thing that we're in now. And I was just absolutely panicked about it.
Did he explain to you why he wanted to take the country into war? I mean, I I'm just trying to understand the dynamics of that conversation. Was what was
he Well, there are multiple conversations. I I flew to Washington three times in the month before, five weeks, six weeks before, and met with him in the Oval Office alone, and, you know, people file in and out with the White House chief of staff, the secretary of state, etcetera. I had lunch with him on one of those occasions, and then I spoke to him by phone many times on this topic. And he would begin almost every conversation with, do you want Iran to have a nuclear weapon? To which I said, well, I'm sort of opposed nuclear weapons.
I don't want nuclear weapons. I don't want Israel to have a nuclear weapon. I don't want anyone to have a nuclear weapon. It doesn't seem like a good thing. But that's not the question.
The question is what do you do about it? And that was kind of the end of the rationale for doing this. He never seemed enthusiastic about it ever. And I would say, well, you know, here are the potential effects of this. Obviously, the geography of Iran being the most important fact of Iran.
Iran is not a military power. It's an economic power. That was obvious because it controls the greatest span of coastline along the Persian Gulf, which is the source of a fifth of world's energy, etcetera, all well known now and well known to him then. And he, I think, perfectly understood the consequences.
But Why was he taking your calls then? Because if he knew your position and he understood the perils I mean, was he trying to convince you to back the war?
No. He made no effort to convince me at all other than to say it's gonna be alright. Everything's gonna be okay. And I I just didn't I didn't feel that way. None of this, I should say, was about Trump or my relationship with Trump or my feelings about Trump or his hair color or anything like that.
I just didn't want The United States to go to war with Iran. And my strong feeling by the end of those conversations, which was the last one, it was probably a week before it began, the war began, was that he felt he had no choice, and that he was resigned to it. He was unhappy about it. He didn't seem enthusiastic at all. There was no effort to say, you know, once we do this, The United States will be at peace.
We'll be safe. We'll be more prosperous. There was none of that. Zero.
I mean, you speak to many people in the administration, and I I'm just trying to understand the fault lines over this. I mean, who was for the war? Who was against it while all this was being discussed?
I mean, I'm I'm guessing to a certain extent. I do talk to a lot of people there still, but I don't work there. So I don't know. It's hard to to really know. You know, there are people with a long record of making bellicose noises about Iran.
They still work there. Specifically, the secretary of state slash national security adviser has, you know, said for many, many years, Iran is the greatest threat we face, which is a ludicrous statement. But has From
that Marco Rubio.
That that'd be correct. But that said, I gotten I didn't hear a single time from anyone, including from the secretary of state himself who I spoke to about this, any enthusiasm for doing this. My strong impression, and I could be wrong because I don't work there, is that no one in the building was pushing for this, at least overtly, that all the pressure was coming from outside. Constant calls from donors and people with influence over the president, well known Rupert Murdoch, Mary Maitelson, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And then a small constellation of, I guess, he'd be called influencers, beginning with Mark Klavan, but there were other Sean Hannity, you know, pushing the president to do this and telling him that you will be a figure out of history, you will save and redeem Israel or something.
I think that was the case they were making. I didn't hear of anybody making the case that this would be good for The United States. I don't think that was ever a conversation.
I mean, there's been a lot of speculation about the president's mindset during this period.
Yes.
And part of it is, of course, about what happened after Venezuela and the successful, in their view, operation there, removing Maduro from office. And that he felt sort of emboldened by, you know, the success of that operation, and that he felt that this was going to be similar. That he underestimated the Iranians and what they might do in response to an attack.
Yeah. Don't believe that. I think the Venezuela operation allowed him to retreat into a kind of fantasy in which he told himself this is gonna be easy. But I don't think he believed that. And I should say, having spoken to him a lot in this calendar year, I detected no evidence at all of dementia, mental decline.
You hear people say, well, he's gone, you know, soft. That was not my impression at all. Trump is not well informed on a lot of topics for sure. He's proudly ignorant on a lot of topics, but he has kind of remarkable powers of insight into people and power dynamics. Like, you don't get to be president by accident.
The guy's smart in the ways that matter politically, and my strong read was that he was doing this against his will. You know, famously, the head of the counterterrorism center, one of the top intel officials in the country, Joe Kent, resigned shortly after the war began and said exactly the same thing. I think this decision is connected to a series of seemingly disconnected events, all of which revolve around violence, and we need to find out more about how this happened. And he was, of course, dismissed and threatened with an FBI investigation, and and no one could have followed up on that. And again, I don't know the answer, but this was not a normal decision making process.
And my strong impression was that Trump was more a hostage than than a than a sovereign decision maker in this.
Well, so tell me what you're getting at when you say the president of The United States, the most powerful country in the world, had no choice.
I don't know what I'm getting at. I'm just telling you what I observed. He seemed and that's kind of the question, and I'm what I'm really fascinated by is the lack of curiosity on display into how exactly this happened. What are the mechanisms by which a guy who's supposedly sovereign, in charge, granted this authority by voters, tens of millions of them, can't make a decision in the country's interest or even in his own interest? He knew, and I know he knew because I talked to him about it directly, that the consequences, potential consequences were profound and profoundly bad.
The end of his presidency to start, which I think it has proven to be. He knew that. And he wasn't this is my read, and I could be completely wrong. I don't know what's in his head, and I don't I don't wanna overstate my knowledge at all. But this is my strong perception on the basis of many conversations on this topic.
He felt he had no choice. And he said to me, everything's gonna be okay. Mhmm. Because I was getting overwrought. Don't do this.
The people pushing you to do this hate you. They're your enemies. This will destroy you. This will gravely harm our country. We've got kids.
I'm hoping for grandkids. Let's not go there. And he said, it's gonna be alright. He said, do you know how I know that? And I said, no.
He said, because it always is. And I I do think there's a kind of, you know, Teddy Rooseveltian optimism there, but that's not really what it was. And this is my read. That was more a kind of justification from a man who feels he has no choice. And that is that is my strong view.
And not just my strong view, the view of others who were around him and involved in this deliberation to the extent it was a deliberation, which is not much.
Who are the other people around him who had that view?
You know, I can't speak for the views of others, but I will just say once again that I never saw nor did I hear about anybody who works for the Trump administration. Anybody who was enthusiastically pushing this war on Trump going and being like, you know what? You wanna be a truly great you wanna make this country great again? We need a regime change effort in Iran. And instead, you know, there were a lot of cowardly people, as there always are, and Trump engenders cowardice in the people around him through intimidation.
And there is a kind of quality that he has that's spellbinding, and I think it probably literally is a spell. And the effect is to weaken people around him and make them more compliant and more confused. And I I've experienced this myself. You spend a day with Trump and sort of like, you're in this kind of dreamland. It's like smoking hash or something.
It's interesting. Very interesting. And there may be a supernatural component to it. I'm not a theologian, but I it's real, and anyone who's been around him can tell you it's real. But whatever the cause, no one around him was weighing in strongly, as far as I know, on either side for or against.
But people from the outside were strongly weighing in, calling him constantly.
I'm gonna give an alternative view on what may have happened. Yes. Which is
And you may be right, by the way, because I I don't wanna overstate what I know.
Sure. I I just wanna just due diligence, we've seen the president in his second term be much more interested in foreign policy as many presidents are, much more open to, taking action, not only in Venezuela, talking about Cuba, wanting the Nobel Peace Prize, you know, weighing into situations in which he wasn't terribly interested in, in his first term.
For sure. That's real.
Could that not be part of this?
It's a huge part of it, and there's no question about that. And all presidents decide, at some point, that they're not interested in running The United States because it's hard. And how do you fix Baltimore and Gary, Indiana? And what do you do about homelessness in Los Angeles? Like, these are hard questions.
We can't even make Head Start work. Despite, you know, many billions and a lot of sort of well meaning people working, spending their lives on it, can't can't make it work. So these are hard problems, and I think it's universal. It's universal experience among American presidents, but also among US senators to decide like, I'd rather run the world because the details are opaque. I don't speak these languages.
You know, I can seem well, first of all, it's a display of male power. Send the bombs in, kill the bad people. But moreover, you get to feel like I did something, and that's important. And I get it. And this is again, as you wisely note, a process that all presidents tend to go through.
And so Venezuela, Cuba, I object to both of those efforts very strongly, but neither one, in my view, risks the future of The United States in the way that the Iran war now does. And so it's a big deal. But because it is, by the way, a contiguous neighbor of Iraq, and because Trump spent years talking about what a terrible idea the Iraq invasion was, in fact, defined his candidacy in 2016 on that point, It's hard for me to believe that he just sort of organically reached this place at the February. He's like, oh, I think it's a good idea. He did not think it was a good idea.
Shutting down a fifth of the world's oil and gas? Of all people, Trump knows that's bad.
You said he's a hostage just now. You told the BBC he's a slave to foreign interests. Correct. So I just wanna ask you to be sort of explicit. I mean, Trump is being held hostage by whom?
By whom? And by what? And his many advocates in The United States. And we know that not simply because Trump started the war on February 28, but because he couldn't get out of it. He declares we're having a ceasefire.
This was three weeks in, four weeks in. He says we're having a ceasefire, and we're having these talks, and they're going great, and we're, you know, we're gonna open the straight. And Iran says, yeah, one of our conditions is Israel's gotta pull back from Southern Lebanon. You can't use the Iran war as a pretext for stealing more land from a sovereign country. That's not your country.
Like, no. And it's not just Iran that who felt that way. I think the rest of the world's like, are you doing? I thought we were, you know, fighting the great existential threat, Iran, and now you're taking the opportunity to take Lebanon Shore, Litani River, and bombing downtown Beirut. Like, what is this?
Anyway, this was all very well known. And within hours of announcing this, Trump announcing this, Israel publicly, in a way that was designed to get the attention of everyone, including the Iranians, starts killing civilians in Lebanon. And what was the point of that? Not to secure the Israeli homeland. The point of that was to end any talk of a negotiated settlement, to keep this going until Iran was destroyed and chaotic, which is the Israeli goal.
I'm not attacking Israel by saying that. Their goals are different from ours. They're a different country.
Yeah. They would argue, of course, that what they are doing is neutralizing the threat. Course. Been persistent in Lebanon to Hezbollah.
Oh, okay. But, I mean, you know, they invaded Lebanon in 1982. Okay? So that was forty four years ago. They've had a lot of experience in Lebanon.
A lot. They've had a lot of time to fix Lebanon. They killed Nasrallah. They blew up Hezbollah with explosive pagers. Like, they've done a lot since October 7 in Lebanon.
They chose that moment to derail the negotiations, and they've done this repeatedly. And so my perspective as an American is, look, we're The United States. We're a country of 350,000,000 people. You are wholly dependent on us. You're a country of 9,000,000 people with no natural resources.
I'm not against you, but, like, we're not co equals here. But the point I'm making is Trump could not restrain Netanyahu. Netanyahu is the one person Trump could not say, hey, settle down, or we'll just defund you and your country will collapse in about ten minutes, which is true. Israel can't defend itself without The United States despite whatever propaganda you may have heard. So, again, it's not an attack on Israel.
It's an attack on American leadership for not constraining its partner in a way that helps The United States. Trump said, I want a negotiated settlement. Israel stopped the settlement. Trump refused to even criticize Netanyahu in public. Are you joking?
That's slavery. That is total control of one man by another. And it's you know, that's between Trump and BB and God as far as I'm concerned. But as an American, that's our president, our elected president, whose job is to protect our country and our interest in our economy. And he is looking out for Israel first.
That's outrageous. I don't and no amount of like, oh, you're an anti Semite, which I'm not, and I'm never gonna be, is gonna stop me from noting that that's outrageous. It is outrageous.
Before we just move on, I am curious about this one point, which is, obviously, Israel has tried to exert its influence on a number of presidents. Many presidents have been asked to decapitate Iran, to do a joint military operation in The Middle East, which this is the first time really that this has happened where The United States and Israel are doing a joint military operation against a Muslim country. And I'm just wondering why you think other presidents didn't have that influence? Because they obviously were subjected to the same pressures, the same donors, the same Yeah. Like, been there since the nineties.
I mean, what do you think has materially changed that made Trump more susceptible to that influence?
I mean, that's kind of the question that I would like answered. And I don't know the answer as noted. But, you know, one argument could be, well, Trump is just uniquely weak. Okay. But that was not my I I think Trump obviously has weaknesses, and a lot of his posturing is compensatory, of course.
I'm not interested in psychoanalyzing Trump, but that's just clear. But what was it about this moment that allowed a foreign leader to have this level of influence over an American leader? And I don't know the answer, but again, think it's worth finding out. I would also note that this is not a defense of Trump hardly. This is the single most foolish thing any American president has ever done, in my opinion.
I say that with sadness. But many American presidents have put Israel's interest before our own. I would say the Iraq war was a very obvious example of that. I mean, Cheney's office was completely controlled, and I I knew almost all of them by people who were putting Israel's interests above America's interests. So I I think the Iraq war was to a great extent a product of that.
And I believe that Trump felt exactly the same way because I talked to him about it a lot. So what changed about Trump? After ten years, more than ten years of telling us, our leadership is weak. They act against our interests. They're stupid.
They're foolish. They're bought off by foreign powers and by domestic donors. I mean, that was Trump's case. That was his whole pitch. That's why he got elected to switch on something this big in the space of a few months.
I mean, that bears some examination. That's all I'm saying.
I wanna note in 2020 when president Trump killed Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, you went on your Fox show and said, and I'm gonna quote here, there are a lot of awful bad people in the world. You can't kill them all. It's not our job. And you asked, why are we jumping into another quagmire from which there is no obvious exit? But it wasn't until president Trump
I was not not heralded for saying that. I don't think I've ever been more criticized. I just really quickly note, I'm opposed not simply to foreign interventions, as you said. I mean, most of them anyway. Those not undertaken in self defense.
I'm against the whole frame. I'm against the idea that Hezbollah and Hamas are at the center of our domestic conversation. Like, they're the big problems we face. They're not. They're not a bigger problem than like the behavior of Citibank.
I'm sorry. Credit card debt is a much bigger problem than Hezbollah will ever be. So stop with this. Stop with the brainwashing. This is bonkers.
I'd live here. I'm almost 57. I've lived here a long time. Hamas and Hezbollah, while they're not getting my endorsement, are not relevant to the experience of most Americans. So, like, once you start thinking like that, you betrayed your country.
So it wasn't until president Trump threatened Iran's civilian infrastructure with a profane truth social post this past Easter Sunday that you actually started quite explicitly speaking out against him.
Yeah. You can't attack Jesus. How's that?
Well, in a monologue on your show, you said, how dare you speak that way on Easter morning to the country? Tell me what you were responding to right then. Because it really is, I think, a seminal moment for you in terms of publicly breaking with the president.
So I will say what I don't do monologues, so that's ad lib. So that's just I didn't write it. I don't have notes. It's just like that's how I feel, so it's probably not as coherent as it should be. But that was really just an emotional reaction to the experience of waking up on Easter Sunday, the holiest day on the Christian calendar, and a day of joy and hope, literally the resurrection of Jesus, and seeing Donald Trump using profanity, threatening to murder civilians.
I mean, that's a crime. That's a moral crime. So to brag about that and then to mock Islam, I don't think you should mock people's faith. I don't care if it's Judaism or Christianity or Islam. But it's especially galling as a Christian who I voted for Trump in 2024.
And one of the main and I never vote typically, but I voted for him this last election and campaigned for him in a bunch of cities with him. Because I felt that there was clear persecution of Christians in this country, people of faith. And it was it was demonstrable. And I felt that Trump, and I based this on his explicit promises, would be a protector of I did never thought Trump was a Christian for a moment, but I thought that Trump, I took him at his word, would be a defender of faith, people of faith who need to be defended, and this country exists to defend them. It's in our charter.
So, anyway, I was just completely outraged by that.
Since that moment, you've gone even further. You recently said on your show that you'll be tormented for a long time by the fact that you played a role in getting Donald Trump elected, and you said I'm sorry for misleading people. That's gotten a lot of attention, as I'm sure you know.
I don't know because I don't Google myself ever. But
I I would like to understand exactly what you mean. Can you explain?
I'll tell you what I mean. I truly believe that the baseline requirement, the ticket of admission to the conversation is admitting when you are wrong. And I spent ten years defending Trump on Fox News. I'd probably do it again because on the issues, I agree with him. I never said a I never defended a single thing I didn't believe.
But at this point, the consequences of this decision are so bad for The United States and for my family and your family, that like you have to say, you just have to say it out loud. Like, I'm a small reason. I don't think I'm I don't think I moved a lot of votes, but I tried to. I told people, this guy will keep us out of the next Iraq. Specifically, it will keep us out of a regime change war with Iran.
And here we are in the middle of a regime change war in Iran, where hundreds of Americans have been wounded. Some number have been killed. They won't tell us. And that's just the opposite of what I said would happen. So I'm sorry.
So I hear you say that, but I am compelled to question it a little bit because are you simply just going public about something that you felt privately for some time? Because in 2021, through the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News, some of your texts went public.
Right.
And I'm just quoting from a couple of them. You know, you said there really isn't an upside to Trump. You said I hate him passionately. I mean, clearly, you had some feelings of reservation about the president
Without question.
Before this time.
There's no doubt.
So I'm just trying to understand the
You know, I have a lot of thoughts and theories about things which, you know, may or may not be rooted in reality. So I hesitate even to spring any of my theories on you because, like, they're probably insane. But one thing that has bothered me for many years is the fact that a lot of people in Trump's immediate orbit have been hurt, and really hurt. You know, gone to prison, become unemployable, publicly shamed, gotten cancer. And I just am a believer in, like, big picture assessments of things.
And, you know, so you're trying to think, like, is Trump good or bad? Like, he's saying things I really agree with. But then people around him are getting hurt. Is the country actually getting better? I don't know.
It's hard to know. Because to some extent, you're, like, your vision is obscured by the intensity of some of these debates. Mine was, has been, is easily obscured by that intensity. But did I have reservations about Trump? Of course.
And, you know, to some extent, I sublimated them or rationalized them away or focused on areas where I agreed with him. All my fault. But I told myself, and I, to some extent, still believe, like, it's the big decisions that matter. And I knew because I know the Democratic leadership really well that they're completely under the control of the same forces, and that we would get a regime change war inevitably in Iran if they were elected. And so I told myself, Trump is the way to avoid the really bad thing.
Come back to this moment for you, which is there's the political case against Trump Mhmm. That you make. But I do wanna ask you about the moral case that you've been making as well, And that's a word that you've used. In that monologue responding to Trump's Easter post, you said that Trump's comments were evil. And I just wanna understand that a little bit better.
Do you think only his comments are evil, or does the evil extend to Trump himself? Is he evil?
I just wanna be really clear that there's a lot of evil in me and in every person. So I just don't want to and I've certainly experienced it in myself, and I've seen it in many in all people. You know, we're all capable of of evil. So I I just I want to pull back on the judgment, and then be very precise about what I was saying, which is you cannot mock other people's gods, and put yourself in their place. Period.
That is a deal killer for me. That's worse than the war with Iran, in my opinion.
Yeah. But I ask because, you know, you've been talking on your show about whether Trump is the antichrist.
I have not said that.
On your show, the day after Easter, you noted he did not put his hand on the bible during his swearing of ceremony as president. You said, and I'm quoting, maybe he didn't put his hand on the bible because he affirmatively rejects what's inside that book. And then on a recent show, you went further saying, here's a leader who's mocking the gods of his ancestors, mocking the god of gods, and exalting himself above them. Could this be the antichrist?
I actually did not say could this be the antichrist. I don't know where that Here's a leader who's mocking the gods of his ancestors, mocking the god of gods, and exalting himself above them. Could this be the antichrist? Well, who knows? But I know that those words never left my lips because I'm not sure I fully understand what the Antichrist is, if there's just one.
I I actually tried to understand it. I may have said some are asking that. I'm not weighing in on that because I don't understand it. And just to be
told No. In Revelations, obviously, the antichrist is named in different
different Yeah. And not just Revelation, but throughout the New Testament. There are references in in in the prophets as well. So but no. I'm not speculating about that.
But I would say it's enough to acknowledge that Trump, like many leaders through history, is putting himself above God. To send but even on a more terrestrial level, like, to send out a picture of yourself as Jesus has got to be a red line for Christians. How could it not be? It it has to be. And I wish that Christians would speak up when he attacks Allah, when he mocks the faith of Muslims.
Just so to be clear, though, you'd that was not what you were suggesting. That if
I if I thought Trump was the antichrist, I would just say so. If I understood what the antichrist is, I would say so. And I don't really. I mean, I guess, literally, it's You've
been discussing it repeatedly on your show. So I'm just trying to understand What
I've tried to
mean, do you want your audience to sort of I want
I want my audience to see what's happening now in terms beyond just material. Obviously, the commodity flow through the Strait Of Hormuz is, you know, essential to the global economy. Got it. But I also think there is a world beyond our senses. Every culture and civilization has understood that from the beginning of time, and we're in this weird anomalous moment where we've been trained not to think that.
But it's real, and this is a realization that's dawning on me. I mean, I I didn't I wasn't thinking like this at all until several years ago. So I don't want to pretend that I'm a shaman or anything like that. I just want to make the point repeatedly, again and again and again, that there are unseen forces that act. There is a spiritual realm, and we are subject to those forces for good and bad.
And I don't think that any person can deny that.
I I just wanna make the point that you did say, could this be the Antichrist? And then you said, well, who knows? You did use those words. So
Man, then my apologies to you if if there's video of me saying that. I I guess what I'm expressing to you is it doesn't reflect exactly how I feel. That suggests a precision that I haven't arrived at. Trump is the antichrist. Well, you'd have to to I mean, this is we're sort of quibbling here, but you'd have to define antichrist, and I know that I can't define antichrist.
And it's not clearly defined in the New Testament or Old Testament.
So you're open to the possibility?
I think what we're seeing is evil. Like, are you allowed to kill people who've committed no crime? No. Super simple. You're not allowed to do that.
Under no moral standard, is that allowable? All of a sudden, allowable. It's allowable in Gaza, and our leaders are like, yeah, no, it's just totally fine. It's not fine. But it's certainly it's repugnant to the Christian understanding of the world and the human soul.
Every person has a soul. That's the Christian view, and not just the Christian view. It's the Islamic view too. So and it's my view.
Your Easter episode was titled in part a warning to Christians everywhere. Yeah. And so my interpretation was that you were warning other Christians sort of not to follow a false prophet.
Yes. That's exactly what I'm warning.
And that false prophet being president Trump Yes. In this case.
And Netanyahu. There are a lot of evangelical Christians who are convinced that God wants you to support Netanyahu, which I find incomprehensible.
Christian evangelicals in this country have been a hugely important part of president Trump's coalition. Many support Israel because they believe the creation of the state of Israel fulfills biblical prophecy. They're called Christian Zionists. I will note you have said you dislike Christian Zionists more than anybody. You've said they have a brain virus.
You have apologized for those comments repeatedly.
Said that.
Repeatedly. But would you like to see those Christians stop supporting the state of Israel in the way that they do?
Of course. Immediately. On many different grounds. But it's really simple. Christians can never support the murder of innocence, period.
That's just that that's just a bright red line. Find the place where Jesus is like, these people are annoying. Kill them all. It's not there. So where are you getting this?
Now I'm, once again, hardly a theologian. And I've asked many Christian Zionist leaders who will speak to me. Now it's just like, they they won't talk to me, but I I certainly asked Ted Cruz this. I asked McCuckaby this. I tried to ask Franklin Graham, but I sincerely wanna know where this is coming from.
It can't all be from the book of Esther.
Well, I mean, you did have exactly this contentious interview with ambassador Huckaby. He's the ambassador to Israel where you talk to him about Christian Zionism for quite some time. And in that interview, you know, it's very interesting. I'm a former Israel Palestine correspondent. You were pressing him on if the modern state of Israel as a homeland for the Jewish people today has legal or biblical legitimacy.
You were sort of questioning him on this idea, and you went round and round on this for quite some time. And I was just wondering what you were trying to get at there.
I was trying to get at an answer, which I couldn't get, and instead was accused of hate for trying to evoke a answer to a very simple question. And the question was, on what basis are you making this claim? People whose ancestors didn't live here now occupy the land. That's very common in history, by the way. I'm not even objecting to it.
What I'm objecting to is the claim that it's God's will, and that Israel, because of this, has the unique right to exist. Unique. Okay. Where does that right come from? Well, the right comes from the Bible.
Okay. Well, I'm not a Bible scholar, but I've certainly read it a lot. And I said to him, where are the borders? Because my read of Genesis is that there was a big hunk of land. That's the Middle East.
Does Israel have a right? Because you're referring to this text as the basis of the right to have that land. And he said, fine with me. So like on many levels, theological and diplomatic, kind of a big thing to say. The White House was annoyed that he said it out loud.
I was grateful that he did, because it's good to know what the terms are. And the second question I asked, which is okay, if Israel has a right derived from this scene in Genesis, then to whom does it apply? Who who are Abraham's heirs? And he said, well, the Jews. And I said, okay.
And by the way, just to be clear, these are not conversations that I sought. I'm not I was never interested in this topic. Like, Israel's a country with borders and sovereignty and a seat at the UN, and it's like a it's a nation state like ours, like every country. The second you start telling me that as a Christian, I'm obligated to support the government of this country, then I have a right to ask you what you're talking about. It's that simple.
So okay. Fine. I flew all the way to Israel, which I didn't wanna do. And I asked him, what are you talking about? To whom does this right apply?
And on what basis? Shut up, antisemite. Okay now. So from my perspective, that was, like, the most revealing conversation I think I've ever had.
Why though were you so interested in those questions about
Why? Because we're now in a war which is in the process of destroying The United States economy and getting Americans killed because Israel pushed The United States president who caved. I'm not giving him a pass, but that's just a fact. That's what happened. I saw it.
And Israel has that power in our congress, not because we have so many Jews. I don't know how many Jews live in The United States. Fewer than 10,000,000, I think. But because we have tens of millions of evangelical Christians who unquestioningly support Israel because they believe it's their theological duty to do so. So on this question hangs the future of the American economy and the lives of American service members.
There's no more important question. And the effort to push me away from that question by calling me names, calling me a hater, saying I'm obsessed with Israel. Okay. I would be grateful never to think about it again. I find Israel actually geostrategically irrelevant, except the extent that we imbue it with relevance at the behest largely of evangelical Christians.
So you can see there's a one to one correlation between these questions and the future of my country. Mike Huckabee and the people he represents have made it the nation's business. At which point, it is entirely fair. In fact, it's a requirement of good citizenship to press him on what are you talking about? And he refused to answer those questions.
At which point, I say, as someone who's still committed to reason, you've been exposed as a fraud and or a liar.
I think one of the reasons why, this was particularly notable for many people, that interaction that you had with Mike Huckabee, and the reason you, in particular, got so much pushback is because there is an enormous sensitivity around Israel being the homeland of the Jewish people and the attempt to delegitimize that.
I have enormous sensitivity about The United States being the homeland of my people and the burial place of my ancestors. I have enormous sensitivity about the future of The United States. Those are my concerns. I'm not dismissing the concerns of any other group, including Israelis or Iranians or Venezuelans or anybody else. Everybody has his or her own set of concerns, but my concerns revolve around my country.
And so I'm not going to subordinate my concerns and the concerns of my children to other people's hysteria, no matter what country it is.
Why do you think you get tagged so often with antisemitism?
Because it's I think there are two reasons. One is I'm not an antisemite, and I think that's obvious. I have and I've expressed this many times, and I'll do so again. I have temperamental and religious objections to anti Semitism, or any hate or discrimination based on bloodline that is against Christian theology. It's against my personal ethics, and I oppose it no matter who is suffering from it.
Whether it's whites or blacks or Jews, nobody can be punished for his bloodline, period. I don't believe in collective punishment, unlike the Israeli government. So that's number one. I am opposed to antisemitism, and that's a threat because I'm not approaching this as someone who wants to hurt Jews. I just don't want The United States to be implicated in the crimes of other nations, and I'm not intimidated.
And number two, that is a much easier conversation than answering very simple questions, like where does the right to exist come from that Israel has, that I've been told for many years has a right a unique right globally to exist. Where does that right emanate from? Who granted that right and on what grounds? And they can't answer the questions, and they don't wanna have the conversation. So just to be totally clear, asking questions is not hate.
Telling the truth is not hate. And they don't wanna answer the questions, and they don't wanna tell the truth. And, by the way, it's not just Jews. I think I've been attacked more viciously by Christian Zionists than I have by Jews, just in point of fact. It's a kind of nice universalism to it.
But I'm not intimidated. I I don't know why I would be. In fact, I think it's my obligation not to be intimidated.
Can asking questions, though, stir up hate? I mean, language is powerful.
Well, sure. I mean, you could pose attacks in the form of questions. I've certainly done that a lot, for sure. But the questions themselves hang in the air, and a legitimate question deserves an answer.
The reason I want to press on this a little bit more is that you know there is an entire antisemitic worldview that has been based on the protocols of the elders of Zion, you know, that there is like this cabal of powerful Jews that controls the world. And that book was written in the early twentieth century, but it, you know, helped the Nazis, and it really has informed a lot of the views of many people today that there is, you know, this very powerful sect of Jewish people who want global war and global conflict. And I think that there is a concern that I have and a real concern. I don't I don't mean this is something that people say to slander anyone, but just a real concern that the rhetoric where everything is blamed on Israel, where Israel has these supernatural powers almost to influence the president, to influence, the previous president, George W. Bush, to enter into the Iraq war, to, you know, be involved in assassinations, etcetera, that it has echoes of that.
And that people are genuinely concerned that it opens the door to this idea that has been debunked and has been used in, you know, absolutely vicious ways to annihilate an entire people.
I'm not quite sure what that means. Let me tell you my concerns. My main concern is the destruction of The United States, and that is in no way to minimize anyone else's concerns, but I have a right to that concern, and I will not have my own concerns hijacked. I will not submit to being told what my concerns should be. I'm an adult man who pays his taxes.
I have a right to come up with my own hierarchy of concern. At the very top is the destruction of my country, which I've lived in for fifty six years, and I know that it's not better than it was, and it's not getting better than it was. And there are many reasons for that. One of them is this war, but there are many others. And so people say, well, I'm really concerned.
Well, I'm really concerned too. I'm really concerned that the prime minister of Israel and his many cheerleaders in American media, including at the New York Times, if I can say, pushed the US government into a war that hurts The United States. That's my concern. And I would say that's at least coequal with anyone else's concerns. So that's the first thing I would say.
Second, as the elders of Zion or whatever, I don't I don't know what that is. I've heard references to it. It's like a czarist forgery or something.
Look. Am I
just wondering what
the line is for you?
The line for me is the truth. What is happening?
Between criticism I mean, this is, by the way, a very difficult line. I am I am in no means purporting to understand necessarily where it is. I'm curious for you where the line is between criticism of the state of Israel and how that could be perceived as feeding into antisemitism.
Well, it breaks my heart that it is perceived that way, and that's the product that perception is the product of a decades long effort to conflate antisemitism with any criticism of the secular government of Israel. Okay? So the IHRA definition of antisemitism lists 11 examples of antisemitism, and that's been adopted globally. 40 different governments have adopted it as their standard of what antisemitism is, and two thirds of the examples are criticism of Israel. So, you know, I don't get to write these standards.
I also don't have to abide by them, And I reject as ludicrous, out of hand, the idea that the criticism of a secular government is the same as criticism of an entire ethnic group. Many of whom do not support that secular government. Many of whom reject that secular government. And a lot of those I know personally. So you're just not gonna get me on board with the lie that criticism of Netanyahu is hatred of all Jews, because it's not.
And I don't care how many times someone repeats that to me. And by the way, I've lost friends over this, and I do grieve that. People who are totally convinced that
criticism Bibi that you're against, or if there was a different government in Israel, it would be okay.
Anything that hurts my country, why wouldn't I be? I live here.
No. But I'm just curious. Like, if there's elections coming up and if Bibi gets kicked out, are you still
I took my family on vacation there. I'm just trying to understand. Against Israel. I've never had been against by the way, you can check the record. Before maybe two and a half years ago, I don't think I ever well, I certainly never criticized Israel, but I never rarely even mentioned Israel.
I could give you a long list of the things that I love about Israel, particularly about Jerusalem, which is one of my favorite cities. Jerusalem and Beirut, greatest cities in the world. It kills me to see them at the center of all of this. I think the second that we ban criticism of a foreign country well, of course, we're not free at that point. We're slaves of that other country.
Whoever you can't criticize is is the force in charge. I don't think it's, by the way, good for global jury to have any of this at all. If you tell 350,000,000 Americans that it's against the law, and it's very close to against the law at this point, it's against a lot of criticized Israel. How does that help the perception? Does that feed antisemitism?
I think it does. Not as my job to monitor or regulate this stuff, but I mean, just common sense would tell you that's not good. If you want to make the case on behalf of anything, any idea, including ones I disagree with, make your case. Tell me why it's a good idea. And we're falling out of that habit, and instead try to hurt people who disagree with us.
And I just will always reject that. I guess I'm the liberal.
I would say it's not exactly against the law, but I understand you're right.
Just found Someone was just arrested. Because look, the second you things that Well, the second you say that criticism is the same as a threat or words or violence, then, of course, it's very easy to arrest people as they are arrested in Great Britain. You'd be right. They've had hundreds of people arrested in Great Britain for criticizing Israel. I don't know why any liberal minded and I'm in that group, liberal minded.
You have a right to your views. I have a right to mine. I don't know why any liberal minded person will go along with this and not say, woah. Woah. Woah.
Woah. This is totally bonkers, and this is the road to totalitarianism. And I would say that about any topic.
I'm gonna move on because we've talked about some fissures that have emerged among conservatives over Israel in the war. Right? You've talked
about Yeah.
It's sort
of blown up.
Yeah. And I wanna dig into that because earlier this year, you told Megyn Kelly that there is, quote, a huge scramble, and you said I'm in the middle of it to define what the Republican Party is after Trump. Yep. So boil down the scramble for me. Are there two sides?
I lost that scramble.
Yeah. I mean, is it driven by ideas, personalities? I mean, something else, like, what do you what do you see happening?
Look. I mean, there have been disagreements over foreign policy within the Republican Party for well, really since 2015 when Trump announced for president. There was no disagreement at all. It was a neoconservative party completely. I was part of that for sure, and unthinkingly, and then unwillingly, but whatever.
But since 2015, there's been this kind of debate like, well, what is the appropriate use of American power, and what is our relationship with Israel? And those have been sort of sotto voce debates. But it's only with this full regime change effort against Iran that they've become untenable. Like, you can't I mean, my own view is I'm always happy to eat with and talk with people I disagree with. Again, I guess I'm the liberal here.
But there is a strong sense among the neocons who've completely taken over the Republican Party that anyone who disagrees cannot be allowed, like, literally in the White House. Okay. I don't make these rules. I feel sad about it. For a bunch of reasons, I would say as a political matter, the constituency for that is very small.
There aren't, you know, a 150,000,000 people in America who are really excited about the Iran war, or who are ever So gonna be excited about you're dooming your party to irrelevance when you do that. I don't know why they would want to. They hate Trump. The neocons hate Trump, have always hated Trump. I I had a first row seat to this, and now they've destroyed him.
And I told them that. I said, these are people who hated you from day one. They couldn't control you. They hated you for that reason. What you said about the Iraq war inflamed them.
It humiliated them, and they want to destroy you, and this war will destroy you. I said that point blank right to him, and it's true. And it's, I think, proven true now.
And what do you mean about you being in the middle of it and losing the scramble?
Well, because Charlie Kirk and I, I think, were the only people I'm confident in saying we're the we're the only people in June 2025 to say to the president, this is a very bad idea. The people pushing this are trying to get you involved in a regime change war. You've campaigned against that. Don't do this. And then in on September 10, Charlie was murdered by a lone gunman.
So by the time this latest round happened in January and February, I I think I was the only person who said that to Trump for a bunch of reasons. So now it's, you know, I mean, we we know who won by the effects. So this was, from my perspective, was a debate between people who thought it was wise to use American power in the way we're now using it, and those who thought it was dangerous. And Trump did it, so obviously, he rejected my view.
I I wanna stay though with how some of this is playing out. Because as you mentioned, you were very close to Charlie Kirk before he was killed. And he started Turning Point USA, which is this very influential group among young people on the right. And you're now seeing some on the right who are questioning whether Israel had a hand in Charlie Kirk's murder. And I should say the theories that Israel was linked to Charlie's death were denied by Israel.
There's been no proof of that at all. And, crucially, this theory has been condemned by Erica Kirk, Charlie's widow. Do you still have a relationship with Turning Point USA?
Well, I I have always loved Erica Kirk. I met her when she was dating Charlie and thought so much of her. I know a lot of people at Turning Point. I was the headliner for a bunch of different Turning Point events. I haven't been asked to do it this year.
Don't know if I will be. Never said a word against Turning Point. I I think it's been a really well, I was their headliner for a bunch of years, so obviously, supported it. I would hate to see it hijacked by its donors to become an oracle of neoconservatism. I think it'd be pretty hard to do, because its members are not for that.
Young people are not for that. People of draft age are especially not for that.
I mean, when was the last time you spoke to Erica Kirk?
Couple of weeks ago.
Okay.
By text. So my concern, and this is not about Erica Kirk or Andrew Colvet or any of those people with whom I've never had a crossword and hope never to have a crossword. But my concern more broadly is about the investigation into Charlie's murder, which was short circuited by the FBI, and I'd like to know why. And I I don't care to be screamed at for asking that question. It's a legitimate question, and we know that.
I know that for a bunch of reasons, but the public knows it because Joe Kent said it out loud and explained it. He's the head of the National Counterterrorism Center. He's an ODNI, and he was told by the FBI that he could not investigate it. And as a friend of Charlie's, I'm not gonna be intimidated into saying the following, which is on what grounds would you do that? I'm not saying the guy who's been arrested didn't pull the trigger.
I'm not there's been no trial.
He obviously handed over by his father.
Do we know that? I don't know what I know. Because I haven't been at trial yet. And again, it's like so many things, and it's not just Israel. It's not just Charlie Kirk.
It's the existence of NATO or the way the economy is structured. Why is capital taxed at half the rate of labor? Like, that's a question that bothers me. In every case, shut up. Socialist, racist, conspiracy theorist.
It's like, I I'm just too old for that. Why don't you answer the question? That's my job.
Do you think Turning Point's influence has waned since Charlie's death?
I haven't the faintest idea. I do think that, you know, I agree with most Americans when I say I think this war is a disaster. It's impossible to see how it hurt helps The United States. And I would like to see all self described conservative groups pressure the president, as Charlie did, to minimize the damage. And then I hope Turning Point is working on that.
I don't know the answer, but I certainly hope they are. I can't yeah. So they should. I I I can't say confidently Charlie would be working to do that.
Obviously, Turning Point is just one organization trying to reach youth on the right. But you also have Nick Fuentes, the far right white nationalist influencer, who's called Hitler effing cool, who also has a huge following among young right leaning men. How do you see Fuentes in terms of the future of the right?
You know, it's so hard to know. I'll tell you my instinct on it. Most of the debates about race, ethnicity, religion, to some extent immigration, are less resonant long term than debates about economics. I think the main frustration among young people is not just that the composition of the country is changing too fast, which it definitely is. But the main concerns are about the lack of economic opportunity for American young people who are totally screwed at like a more profound level than people acknowledge.
Older people do not acknowledge that. Had dinner the other night with a bunch of kids from Stanford, really smart, they're at Stanford. One of them said, oh, yeah, his best friend just graduated with a degree in computer science last year, has not been able to find a job. Stanford computer science can't find a job. So that's like a window into the total destruction of the economic opportunity for young people.
And the what looks to me as a non economist, like the true hoarding of capital by a tiny group of people, it looks like a very lopsided and unfair economic system that is guaranteed to radicalize young people. And not just young people, but especially young people. And so I think most future conversations politically will be about economics. I do think that. I think we're at sort of the last stage.
This is the last time The US has ever So
you so you see what I'm trying to understand is you see that as Fuentes' power waning?
For sure. Well, I don't know Fuentes in particular. I mean, I, you know, never even wasn't even aware of Fuentes. I mean, again, I'm just in a different world. Right?
Okay. I read the New York Times or whatever. Like, I'm just older. Okay? So I'm not an expert on Fuentes' reach or even what he's saying day to day.
I really don't know. But he has been caricatured as a race guy, which he may be, by the way, was like mad about the Jews or black people or whatever. But I'm just telling you, I think the future, the energy, not just on the right, but I I think right and left agree on this under 30, is that young people have been shafted by older people, particularly by the baby boomers, people born between 46 and 64. And I think they're right about that. I do think that's like the most selfish generation, most loathsome mediocre generation in this country ever produced.
Not all of them, but in general, I would say their behavior has been shameful and selfish. And I hear young people talk not about, you know, I'm mad at the Jews. I hear young people say things like, only baby boomers would like have a second home in Isle Of Palms, South Carolina, but like not help their kids buy homes. That's what I hear. I hear people who understand that their lives will bear no resemblance to the lives of their parents and grandparents, and they're really upset about it.
Meanwhile, there are always people making billions on clearly fraudulent enterprises, crypto related enterprises, and other enterprises that are like not adding to the sum total of prosperity in this country and not making the country better. So that's where I think the radicalism is gonna start. The murder of that health care executive in New York, the health insurer guy, I'm against all murder. Just okay. Just to be totally clear.
But I was surprised, but not really shocked by the reaction, the positive reaction. Always kind of normal looking people on the Internet are like, I'm glad they killed him. Didn't even know his name. However, that reflects this revolutionary frustration. And I do think it's revolutionary.
I I think one of the reasons that Trump is apparently gonna make weed legal is just so we can lower testosterone levels even more. Just make people more passive. Have some more benzos. Like, it's fine. It's totally fine.
Because it's not fine is the truth. So again, long winded answer to a short question, but I the future that I imagine is not a future in which we're yelling at each other about race. It's a future in which people are legitimately revolutionary, maybe even violent on the basis of thwarted economic opportunity.
I mean, Fuentes wants America to be a white Christian nation among other things.
Okay. Well, he's very good at defending the New York Times, but I think the real issues are not about Fuentes or even about race. Immigration has a direct effect on economics. And so the overwhelming majority of newly created jobs in the past five years have gone to foreign born. So like that's it's not an attack on the foreign born to say that's not really the job of the US government to provide economic opportunity to the world.
The job is to protect its own people.
I can tell you don't wanna talk about Fuentes.
Well, I don't I don't have what to say. Let me just think okay. He said naughty things about this, that, or the other thing. Okay.
No. Well, you caused a big I'm focusing on you. This is an interview
you cause anything. People got hysterical. How can you talk
to this man? I talked to people brought Fuentes onto your show.
I've interviewed Ted Cruz who's calling for the murder of innocents. I don't think Fuentes is doing that.
But that conversation was pretty friendly. Know, you've
say that. I mean, whatever. Okay. I'm naughty for talking to Fuentes. But
But you've been doing this for decades. I mean, I have watched you and your shows
Mhmm.
For a very long time. And you obviously have a very savvy understanding of how to approach your interviews and how they're going to land. Why I
don't know about that. But yeah. Well I don't think I'm that savvy. Maybe I'm underselling myself.
I mean, why did you wanna handle it the way that you did? You know, you started with Well, I've
Well, I've explained this million times, but I'll explain it very crisply. No.
You you started, you know No.
No. I noticed it in no way.
Talking about his background and where he grew up. It's a it's a different kind of interview than the one when I look at ambassador Huckabee.
I've known Huckabee for over thirty years. He's been a public figure for over thirty years.
But one prosecutorial. You were building a case. The other one was friendly. I mean, you were wrestling quite vigorously with
If I agreed with everything Fuentes said, would just say so. I would just say so. Like, there's no the the effort to kind of, like, divine my motives when I state my motives clearly. I think I'm telling the truth.
I know. But what you as you have acknowledged and said, let me do state
my motives.
You use questions sometimes as a form
If I could just state my motives Attack. And you can either believe me or not, and I've done this many times, I'll do it once more, and say, I never heard of Fuentes. I first heard him because he was attacking me and my family, which enraged me. I did fall for the bait. And so then I thought, well, this guy seems like he I keep hearing he's very influential.
Let's have him on here what he has to say. So I did that. And on the question of hating Jews because they're Jews, I'm opposed. Told him that to his face. Lots of people decided that I should have taken a different tone.
Okay. Do your own interview with Fontes if you want. That's okay with me. But I guess what I've come to believe, I I didn't feel it was a significant interview, especially on any level, except the extent it was used to try and make me into a Nazi, which again, I'm not, I would admit it. But what I think is interesting is the is the kind of moral scheme that that interview revealed, which not surprisingly is childish and kind of repulsive.
And by moral scheme, mean, like, what the people in charge, including in journalism, think is right and wrong. So I think anyone who calls for the murder of innocence or justifies them is the lowest possible person. There's nothing worse than that than killing kids. And you take someone like Randy Fine or
Ted Cruz. Representative from Florida.
Yeah. Mike Cuthbert. And Texas. These are all I don't know Fine, but I but I know the other two very well and have for many years. And both of them just been like, know, we should go kill people and and their kids, and they make excuses for that.
Like, there's nothing worse than that. And yet, those are total the only controversial part of those interviews from the perspective of others in journalism is that I was too mean. I was too tough. I was too tough on Mike Huckabee, who's a sitting US ambassador, or Ted Cruz, who's a
I don't think that was the concern.
Whatever. Okay. But
but the point it is I you know, you when you just compare them.
Who do you think is more morally repulsive? Ted Cruz
or the point is morally repulsive?
Ted Cruz. Ted Cruz is a sitting US senator who has called for the killing of people who did nothing wrong, whole populations who advocated for this war. Nick Fuentes is like a kid. He's like 26 or 70. He's got like a stream or something.
I don't even know what it is. He has no power except his words. Here you have a public official who we pay, who has actual power, who's voting for things, who's making policy decisions. And those decisions would include in fact, they are focused on the murder of people who did nothing wrong, and yet no one thinks it's a big deal. What the well, this is totally fine.
I mean, if there's tape of Nick Fuentes saying we should kill people because we hate their parents or it's okay to kill children. I would love to see the tape, because that's disgusting. And that's basically what the entire US senate does every single day, and no one notices. Nick Fuentes said something naughty that I disagreed with. He made fun of things that I don't think would never make fun of
white nationalist was denied the Holocaust. And what I will say Okay. Is that worse
than killing kids?
From my from my understanding of my own you know, I was just in Germany recently, and, you know, it was such a good reminder that the Holocaust didn't start with the gassing of Jews. It started with the dehumanization of Jews. It was language that was used. And, again, is what concerns people.
More. And that's why when you have a US senator, a member of congress, a US ambassador waving away civilian deaths as if they don't matter, that's the language of genocide which results, and this is the lesson of the Holocaust, in genocide itself. And it has. So the lesson for me, really, watching all of this, is that this can happen in civilized countries, in all human beings. There is the capacity to ignore the evil right in front of you.
And I'm my point is, it's happening right now. And my job, to the extent I have one, don't really have a job, but I just want to remind people that we're all capable of that, including me, and that we're watching it right now. And if you think that Nick Fuentes is a greater threat to other human beings than Ted Cruz, I would love to know how.
I can imagine people hearing this and thinking you are soft pedaling Nick Fuentes. You are apologizing for
the plaintiffs. Soft pedaling Nick Fuentes. I'm trying to awaken people to killing of innocence in our midst, which we are not only encouraged to ignore, but really told to ignore on pain of being denounced. And I'm just saying, no. I'm not doing that.
And Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee are two of the main people making this moment possible and president Trump. But Nick Fuentes is the problem? Okay. It's not a defensive Nick Fuentes. It's merely like a reality check for the rest of us.
What are we doing?
We began this conversation by discussing your rupture with president Trump. And I'd like to ask about your relationship with the vice president because you were one of the people credited with getting him into that role. You were close to him. You advocated for him. Are you still close to Vance considering your rupture with the president?
I mean, I will always love J. D. Vance as a man. I think and I'm I'm making this judgment on the basis of his public statements over many years. I think he's in a tough spot.
He's in a tough spot. I mean, he's on the record repeatedly saying this is exactly the thing that this administration would avoid doing, and now they've done it.
President Trump was also on the record saying
As I've said many times. Exactly. And by the way, I wouldn't characterize it as a rupture with Trump. He betrayed his promises to me and everybody else, and I acknowledge that in public. So it doesn't make me the person who breached the contract.
He's the one who breached the contract, to be clear. But it puts the vice president in a super difficult spot, and I know him well and think so much of him as a person. And it is my guess that based on his past behavior, that he's doing everything he can to mitigate what he sees as the ill effects of this. And but it's kinda hard to call the shots when you're vice president because that's not in the constitution. So, no, I I would never I I put him in a bad situation just by my public you know, he was attacked endlessly for my Nick Fuentes interview.
Woah. So scary. And okay. So I've always felt bad about that. He didn't do anything.
You know what I mean? But I was used as a cudgel to beat him over the head because the neocons hated him because they thought that if he ever became president, he would be less compliant than than the president turned out to be. So, you know, I don't wanna add to that at all. I think he's a really good man. I know he's a good man because I know him very well.
But, you know, I I don't have anything else to say to anyone in the administration because I can't affect
You don't talk to him anymore? Outcome. When was the last time you spoke to the vice president?
Oh, I don't know. But I wouldn't I wouldn't I don't wanna add to his problems at all. But I would just say what's obvious is that I'm hardly an adviser to this administration.
And
and I think it's also clear that Donald Trump makes these decisions.
You really don't know the last time you spoke to vice president J. D. Vance? Weeks, months, days?
I don't know. I mean, I would never characterize that. I don't wanna cause him more problems. I'm just saying I'm not advising. No one's seeking my counsel.
I'm not trying to influence anything. I gave it my best shot. It didn't work.
Well, let me ask you this. Vance was not in favor of the war, but he ultimately didn't seem willing to die on the hill. I mean, he could resign. He could there's many things he could have done, I suppose. Do you wish he'd been more forceful?
You know, I will just say, I'll just be totally blunt about what I'm doing, which is taking a pass on your question
Mhmm.
And say that I know JD very very well, and I think it's like super tough situation. He's in my prayers. I mean that. And I just don't want to add to the what is clearly a really hard job.
I know that if you were in my position, you'd press.
Oh, go go crazy. But I'm just saying like, I'm start I mean, I my only goal is I just wanna be honest, and so I'm being as, I think, as transparent as I possibly can be or I'm I'm
And I'm being and I'm being transparent at in saying that my job is also to press you. I get it. So however he has felt privately, publicly, Vance has been a loyal soldier
Yes.
Even going so far as to head the recent negotiations with the Iranians. And we've seen and you've commented how unpopular this war is among the American people. Do you think the role that he is playing right now will hurt his political prospects?
There are people in the White House who want to hurt J. D. Vance, and have wanted that since the very first day. They were bitter. They wanted Marco Rubio to be the choice as vice president.
And so J. D. Has been subject to, this is well known, but I'll just confirm it, nonstop treachery from people on the neoconservative side
Who are these people?
Around Marco Rubio. And by the way, Marco Rubio's gotta be one of most charming people in the whole world. And, you know, it's it's impossible to dislike Marco Rubio, and I'm not an intimate friend or anything. But so I can't say to what extent he's involved in it. But certainly, he is the choice of the donor class.
The donor class is avowedly neoconservative. That's why they give money for outcomes like the ones we're watching. That's why this whole system is completely rotten and just impervious to reform, and they had been totally against J. D. Vance from the very beginning.
Oh, what do you mean specifically? Because, I mean, it was interesting in those conversations with Susie Wiles, for example, where she was very much praising Marco Rubio and had less maybe complementary things to say about J. D. Vance. I mean, is that to whom you're referring?
You know, I don't know is the real answer. I don't know.
Mean, you're accusing people of treachery, so I'm wondering
Well, I know there's been a lot of treachery for sure, and I know they've been they were so mad about JD getting that job. I mean
They? Who's they?
Well, Mary Maitelson, for example, Rupert Murdoch, you know, people who were very much vested in using Trump for what we're seeing now.
But within the White House?
I don't you know, I don't know the answer to that. I've never worked there. So like, if you don't work there, you can say you you know, you can say what you think you know, but it's hard to really know.
This is me looking skeptical.
Yeah. Well, no. This is me being honest. Like, I don't really know. And you read all these things about, you know, Susie, you know, is, of course, a product of Florida, and there's a whole Florida group, and the consultants, and Marco, and all the rest, and people whisper about that.
Is that true? I really don't know. I've never heard her say anything against JD. She seemed to love JD, but who knows, man? You know, who knows?
But I know. I I I definitely know that, like, outside, it was hard to believe that Mark Levin and Laura Loomer, who are, you know, like, have no constituency whatsoever and would have influence in the White House, but they do. And both of them have been out for Vance from day one, big time.
Do you think it's hurting though his political prospects, to repeat the question, that he has been put in the position according to you that he is fronting these negotiations in Iran?
Yeah. I mean, well, it's I think this whole thing no. It's not even JD specific. This whole thing is like dooming anyone connected to it for the foreseeable future, including the entire Republican Party. And, you know, if you're psyched for president Gavin Newsom, I guess that's a good thing.
I'm not. So I think it's a disaster. It's a true disaster. And again, I told Trump this like 10 times. Like, this is gonna blow up your legacy.
All this gold you put in here, like, they're gonna take it down and mock you as they do? Like, this is gonna blow up your you're concerned about your legacy. You're 80 in June. Like, I get it. But this is not the way, and I and I think that's proven true.
So you think this will doom J. D. Vance as well? I
don't know. Doom. I mean, I I'm obviously not good at calling the future, but I I couldn't be more you know, I couldn't be a bigger fan of him as a man, but I think anybody connected to this is gonna have a hard time explaining it. Because how is this good for The United States? It's not.
One more question on this particular issue. It was just published that your son who worked for the VP left that job. Did your rift with Trump have anything to do with that and Zero. Make it hard for
He was not forced out of the role Okay. At all. And and my understanding of it is let me just say, in a normal world, in a decent world, my son or my son's job would have no relevance at all to me.
Why did your son leave then? If he if he wasn't forced out.
I don't know. You can ask him. But he was there over a year. Like, don't know. White House is an intense place to work.
I don't want talk about my son. He's got nothing to Do with
I mean No.
But that's kind of the point. Like, we need to defend the core beliefs of our civilization, which by the way, are attractive to the entire world. People move here not just for our robust economy, but because they wanna be judged on the basis of what they did, not on what their parents did. That's the whole point. That's collective punishment.
It's blood guilt, and we reject it. I gave this lecture to Nick Fuentes. I gave this lecture to Mike Huckabee. The lecture never changes because the idea is the core idea of our civilization.
Since you mentioned Nick Fuentes, I have one last question. You opened the door. I don't care about
Nick Fuentes.
He is not a JD Vans fan. He's called him a race traitor because of his marriage to Osha. Care. He's like Who is Indian American? Wait.
Let me finish the question. I mean, given how influential Fuentes is right now.
Is he?
Is he not?
I don't know. It doesn't seem to be. He didn't get us into war with Iran. Like, who cares, actually? That's kind of what I'm saying.
Like, all of this is like a sideshow. Americans are being killed in a foreign country at the behest of another foreign country, and it's gonna wreck the US dollar and cause hyperinflation in our country. And we're, like, fretting about what some kid on the Internet said. It's like, who cares actually?
But there's
This is a way of taking us away from the core issues, which are economic. They're economic. And that is the one thing that nobody ever wants to talk about. How is the money distributed? Where does the money come from?
No one wants that that's why, like, the only left wing movement I ever had a lot of sympathy for was the one that arose after the global financial crisis, Occupy Wall Street. I wasn't I didn't know exactly what they were about, but I was like, yeah, we should be mad at the banks because, like, they did this and no one got punished. And within, like, twenty minutes, we're talking about black people and white people. It was like
I'm I'm I'm I'm happy to talk about economics, but your interview with Fuentes has 25,000,000 views. But to say that it doesn't matter isn't an it better
than what sense? Like, does it matter more than
But let me let can I finish my question? Thank you. Given how influential he is, and I I just don't think that there's any argument about that. I'm wondering how why. I'm wondering how you think JD Vance could become the leader of the party after Trump if you have someone like Fuentes speaking so critically of him?
So I love I'm so glad you asked that question because its premise reveals everything.
Alright. Tell me.
So the premise of your question is that JD Vance can't
No. I'm not saying that he can't.
It's gonna be difficult for JD Vance to advance politically because of
I'm asking, do you think
Just the the premise that it could be that JD Vance's interracial marriage is a bigger problem than his foreign policy views.
No. I didn't say that. It it doesn't No. I'm saying that there is a person who is incredibly influential in the fight.
Is he incredibly influential? Like, on whatever what base are saying now?
Oh, my goodness. There's there's lots of evidence. Not only in the reach of what he talks about, but also Can
Can you name a single member of member of congress who's acknowledged his existence, or said I did this because he told me to?
That's a gripper? I I I don't know that there's
not a single member of congress who would ever stand Olin, who would ever stand up and say or even show evidence of being influenced by Nick Fuentes, where they're out of 535, there are about 500 who are taking money from APAC.
I have already asked about the war's impact on Vance. This is a question about the future of the party, and the future of any party are its young people. And and in the same way that Turning Point USA has influence on young conservatives, so does Nick Fuentes. And so
I guess. I don't know how we're measuring that.
But I don't What I'm trying all all I'm trying to ask you here is is if you no. But but listen. There is
What I'm trying to
strain a strain in the Republican Party, especially among young people who are racist, who talk about JD Vance and his marriage in a particular way, and I'm asking you, and you can decide not to answer it, but I'm simply asking you Well,
I'm trying to answer it.
I'm You know, if you think that that is going to be a problem for J. D. Vance leading the party.
Because Let me answer your question.
Thank you.
You were unable to to just to tell me how Fuentes was influential in any way Uh-huh. Other than the views on a video, which were probably lower than those on your average porn video. So that's, like, not a good measurement. It's not meaningful. Does he have influence on our politics?
I haven't seen any. So let's just start there. Second, J. D. Vance's problems with young people and old people and the party itself revolve around his views on foreign policy and economics, which are the issues that actually matter.
Third, race is thrown up as a distraction, so often, as in this case, to distract from what actually matters because on questions of economic let me just finish. On questions of economic Fontes. If I can finish. On the Fuentes himself is a distraction from the conversations that matter. Because power is displayed through the structure of the economic system, globally and per country, and in the use of force.
So it's the economic program and the foreign policy program are what matters in every government from the beginning of time. Those are the two questions on which there's a bipartisan consensus in Washington between Republicans and Democrats that were we should do this thing. The public rejects that thing on both categories. They reject the economics that are a consensus choice in Washington, and they reject the foreign policy, this consensus choice in Washington. And so Washington's response, Wall Street's response as well, is to be like, let's have a race war, and you guys can like argue over blacks or whites or whether JD is married to an Indian woman.
Like, what? And so Fuentes is incredibly useful for people with actual power to divert the conversation to something that is both irrelevant and divisive because it's a divide and conquer strategy. And my strong view gained over thirty five years of watching carefully and being involved is that that's come to its end.
Okay.
And I JD's real problems are his foreign policy views, the ones he's articulated for ten years, are in direct opposition to the foreign policy views the people who fund the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. Same people. And they have the same views.
It's the idea of the uni party.
It will on these questions, it's totally true. We can argue about the trans, the trans thing. Another you can have legitimate views on race, legitimate views on trans. That's all those are real issues. I'm not saying they're not.
But those are not the issues on which empires rise and fall. Though the real issues are economics and foreign policy, and on those issues, there's a bipartisan consensus. And so they throw up like, no, we were disagreeing on trans. We're disagreeing on affirmative action or whatever. But they disagree on all that matters.
And JD disagrees as Trump did, at least in his public statements. So this is the wrong foreign policy course. This economic system is hurting young people. And so Fuentes shows up, and everyone wants to talk about Fuentes because it's really safe. No one wants to talk about why are capital gains taxes half those of taxed on regular income?
Like, I think that's, like, a critical debate. You will never have that debate. Have you ever asked a question about that? No. No one ever asked that.
And I think that's, like, nothing's more important domestically than that, but whatever. That's my opinion.
Okay.
I wish I hadn't done the interview because Really? Yeah. It was totally not worth it. I mean, it was like kind of interesting, I guess. But it was used as I added to the distraction.
What I really wanted to talk about was where we were going in this war with Iran. And I spent like a month getting calls from people being like, you're a Nazi. Okay. And I wish I hadn't done that. Not that it didn't imperil my soul.
I've interviewed far worse people than Nick Fuentes, like Mike Huckabee, far worse person than Nick Fuentes, hurt many more people than Nick Fuentes, same with Ted Cruz. But so I don't think it affected me. I interview people I disagree with all the time, and often I'm polite to them, including war criminals. The only person I've really been impolite with is Ted Cruz, because I have limited self control, and he's just so repulsive I couldn't control myself. And I was a I was a jerk, and I tried to apologize.
But if you had to sit across from Ted Cruz, it's just there's something about him that's just like repulsive. I mean, it's like disgusting. Like, if you entered a men's room and Ted Cruz was there, you would be like, I can hold it. I'm leaving. And and I broke down under the strain of his repulsiveness.
But in general, I try to be nice to everybody. But, man, that that Fuentes interview, I just added to the distraction.
I think we're done for now. We're gonna speak again.
We're gonna speak again?
Yeah. You didn't know that?
No.
Oh, you thought this was one and done? Oh my man. No. After the break, Carlson and I speak again, and he tells me just how much regard he has for America's political parties.
I don't have any partisan agenda at all. The Republican Party could not be more repulsive to me. The Democratic Party, same thing. I think the parties, and I'm saying this on the basis of a lot of knowledge, are rotten beyond repair or at least simple repairs. Oh, big yacht, the Lexus, bragging about money.
Those are just props. That's not the engine. That's not the emotion that my music is running on.
That is, of course, Jay Z. I'm John Karamonika, one of the critics behind the New York Times' 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters Project. We interviewed some of the songwriters on our list, including Taylor Swift, who hasn't sat for a video like this in a long time.
Yeah. Criticism has been a huge fuel for me, like a creative writing prompt or something.
These are not ordinary conversations. These creative superstars are sharing parts of their process in ways that you rarely have access to. On top of the mad task of picking only 30 people, we also went out and got some music world heavyweights to weigh in. Watch all the video interviews for free and check out the entire 30 greatest living American songwriters project at nytimes.com/30greatest or in the app. And let us know if you agree with our picks.
I bet you won't.
Hi.
Hey. How you doing?
I'm good. Alright. You're a little loud in my ear. Let me let me turn you down.
I'm a little loud in many people's ears.
Thank you for taking time to talk to me again. I definitely wanted to circle back on something because we ended up our last conversation talking about vice president Vance. But I also wanted to ask you about somebody else that you were close to, and that's Don Junior, the president's son. Mhmm. He supported your new media venture after you left Fox.
So I'm wondering what your relationship is now considering your comments about his father. Have you talked about it? Are you still in touch?
I've known Don for a long time. We share a common love of the outdoors, and we don't actually talk a lot about politics. We talk mostly about hunting and fishing. So I have not spoken to him about the war in Iran and probably won't, but, you know, I think his views on that are pretty pretty well known.
So you're still in touch, in other words?
Yeah. Absolutely. And I and I expect to be. I mean, Don's a friend of mine and a and a really good guy, but our our relationship is not political at all, really. I'm in fact, I I don't remember the last time I talked about politics.
Yeah. I mean, I guess it brings me to this wider issue about how you critique the president. You're always quite careful to say how much you like him personally.
Mhmm.
Are you worried about alienating his base, though? Because aren't they some of the same people who tune in to your show?
Well, I don't think I'm careful about saying it. I wanna be honest about saying it. I mean, you know, in part because I was out promoting Trump, you know, pretty aggressively for a long time. As for his base, I mean, I don't have a base. I'm not a candidate for office and don't plan to be.
You have an audience, though.
Do have an audience. Yeah. And it's grown. And, you know, it's not exactly clear who that is. I mean, you I get these readouts from our tech guys while we have, you know, new people watch.
Well, who are they? You know? It's like you don't really know. But, you know, this war is unpopular. The idea of sending Americans over to risk their lives to regime change in another part of the world is itself unpopular, whether it's in Iran or any other country.
So, I mean, I think I'm on the side of the majority in this country, and maybe the numbers reflect that. But I'm I'm you know, I don't I don't really think about that when I'm thinking through what we talk about who I interview.
Because I I mean, when you do look at your page on YouTube, you do definitely see that the numbers are much bigger when you talk about the war in Iran. And so
Well, we're in a war with Iran, and it's the biggest thing that's happened in my lifetime, and the potential consequences include nuclear war. And so it's an inherently big deal, and it's being ignored or downplayed by most of the rest of the media. So I think we benefit from taking it seriously, but it's inherently serious. That that's my view of it. And so I would talk about it no you know, almost no matter who watched or didn't, because I think it's that it's that important.
One more question about the president. Your comments have clearly gotten under his skin. I mean, he's posted long screeds on Truth Social about you. Mhmm. And, you know, to refer again to those texts that came out in the Fox News Dominion legal fight, there was one from you saying that Trump is good at destroying things, and you wrote Yes.
He's the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong. I mean, do you worry about him destroying you now? He's got a lot of power.
I don't worry about him destroying me. I mean, I'm turn 57 next month. My kids are grown. I mean, there's not really what can you do to me? I don't work for anybody, and I'm not that worried about my own life anyway.
But he does have the capacity to destroy, and I do think that it's a binary you're either creating or destroying in this life. And I think he has proved through the course of his life better at destroying than creating. I mean, he's created some, but I, you know, I have a strong preference for creation over destruction. And, you know, he he's look. One of the reasons that I appreciate Trump from day one in addition to always enjoying his company and finding him hilarious is because he was very good at assailing the foundations of rotten structures.
And I knew that they were rotten because I am from Washington, and I knew those institutions well. And I knew that despite, you know, how they described themselves, they were basically just fatuous and long outdated and probably deserved to be taken down like a a house with rotten sills. And Trump was great at exposing that and and taking them down. You know, USAID. As someone from DC, I knew a lot about USAID, and I I was why are we doing this?
You know, this is counterproductive to American interests, and Trump just went in there and took it out. And and I like that, but that is the first step. Of course, that can't be the end stage. The first step is you you scrape the old property, then you build something new and better and beautiful. And we haven't gotten to that part of the program, and it's not even really being promised at this point, which is troubling.
Do you see a path towards supporting him again? I mean, if he suddenly took actions that you agreed with, do you see yourself coming back into the fold?
I'd support anybody who made life in The United States better. Of course. It's not it's absolutely not personal, and that's part of what I hope to convey by always adding the caveat, but I like Trump because it's not personal. So I would always support any and I mean, literally anybody no matter how unlikely the person, no matter how much I disagreed with his previous policies or reviled him as a man or whatever. No.
It doesn't matter. If someone's doing a good thing, I wanna be honest enough to say, god bless you for doing that, and I support that thing. So it's it's really about what a person is doing. It's about the fruit rather than the perception. You you make this country better.
I don't care who you are. I will cheer you on because I live here, and I want the country to get better. It's not getting better. Now it's very hard for me to imagine any scenario in which we look back on the last two months, this war with Iran, and say that really made us more prosperous, safer, happier, united our country. It's I just can't imagine that.
But then, you know, a lot of things I haven't been able to imagine. So if that happens, I will be the very first person to say, well, I was completely wrong about that, and I'm sorry. And I'm grateful that I was wrong. And I and I will really mean it because I I'm not again, I I don't have any partisan agenda at all. The Republican Party could not be more repulsive to me.
The Democratic Party, same thing. So I I just am in this weird nonaligned place, and it's it's totally sincere. Like, I think the parties, and I'm saying this on the basis of a lot of knowledge, are rotten beyond repair or at least simple repairs.
Can you imagine creating a new party? I mean, can you imagine there being a different party that would more closely align to your views and perhaps others? I mean, if you're saying that these parties are rotten beyond repair, what are you proposing, if anything?
Let let me just say, just to be more precise, nothing is rotten beyond repair. Repairs are always possible.
You know? People getting poll
I meant it's a it's a cliche, which I and I should have used on those grounds. Rotten beyond remodeling, I would say. This can't you know, you can't just put a new coat of paint or fresh drywall on these structures because they are ridden with rot. Okay? So I would like to see them repaired.
That would be the simplest solution. I don't think that's likely to happen. So, of course, I would be thrilled to to see the rise of a party that represented the majority of Americans, at least by intent. Look. It's not even a question of, you know, are you for this tax rate?
Are you for that tax rate? It's a question of orientation. Are you going to have a political party whose number one aim is helping the people who put it in power, helping the citizens of The United States? And neither party can say that, honestly, because neither party is very interested in its own citizens. Democratic party's much more interested in importing new noncitizens, making them citizens, and making reliable voters out of them, and the Republican party is much more interested in, I don't know, fighting wars for a foreign country.
So whatever you think of those aims, neither one is focused on the needs of Americans. And I think somebody should be in a representative democracy. Like, there should be a party that is speaking for most people. Am I gonna build it? Absolutely not.
I'm not a politician, but I would support it. With whatever I had, I would support it.
And who do you imagine being the head of that party?
I have literally no idea.
So could it be someone on the left?
Well, it could be anybody. I'm not even sure what the left means at this point. I mean, I have some very good friends on the left. Now they're not conventional West Side liberals. You know?
They're not they don't have signs in this house. We believe in science. Like, that sort of dopey lifestyle liberalism of my childhood. Like, I think that's kinda played out. Like, ladies telling you to put your mask on.
Like, you know, no one wants that. But I have some sincere left wing friends who have a critique of economics and foreign policy that I agree with completely or or substantially agree with for sure.
One last question on this. Obviously, you're in Maine. Graham Platner is a Democrat who is vying to be the senate candidate. Is that someone that you whose ideas you are interested in at all?
I mean, I certainly appreciate his foreign policy views, and I I appreciate how different they are from everybody else's in this party. I haven't met him, and I I plan to meet him. I don't know a lot about his other views. You know, I think at this point with AI posed to destroy some high percentage of American jobs, there's really no justification for immigration of any kind into The United States. You can't say, well, we're gonna you know, 30% of lawyers are gonna be out of work, and this percentage of software coders or accountants or, you know, any other sort of supportive family type job.
They're all gonna evaporate because of this new technology, but we have a bunch of new h one b people we'd like you to meet. That's just cruelty both to and most important to American citizens, but also to the immigrant. Like, what are we doing? So anybody who's for diluting our labor pool with foreign labor is, you know, clearly not acting in the interest of the country, and I couldn't support anyone like that. But, you know, we the prerequisite to having a rational conversation about immigration it.
Okay? It's not not everything is about race.
I am
so The truth is sorry?
No. No. Was finish your thought, and then I was gonna jump in.
Well, just we are looking at the elimination of some very large unspecified number of American jobs due to technology.
And
there are gonna be a lot of unemployed people, including a lot of unemployed immigrants in this country, and you have the potential for disunity and and actual disruption, you know, rupture the social fabric to the extent it still exists. And so you have to shut down immigration right now.
I'm glad you brought up immigration because I was thinking about what you said in our last conversation about race, and I'm gonna quote you here. You said most of the debates about race, ethnicity, religion, to some extent immigration are less resonant long term than debates about economics. And you said race is thrown up as a distraction. And you are someone who has spent a lot of time, though, talking about those issues. You know, you've denigrated immigrants saying that they make our country poorer and dirtier and more divided, and you've long warned that immigrants are going to replace what you call legacy Americans.
Well, they have. The overwhelming majority of new jobs in the last five years have gone to immigrants, not Americans. So And but wait. Let me finish debate, actually.
But yeah. But you you called Iraqi semiliterate primitive monkeys. I mean, you've used language that many find
What year did I say that? Do you know?
I think it was in 2018.
Oh, I did not say that in 2018.
Oh, no. 2008. I'm so sorry. Yeah. 2008.
So 2008.
Right. Yeah. So the point is I'm a racist?
Is that No. No. The point is, were you part of the distraction? The question is, were you part of the distraction? Because you were using those you know, talking about those issues quite a lot.
I wasn't actually talking about those issues quite a lot, but I I would say I have been involved in many distractions, including that. I'm not saying race is immaterial. Race is important. Race is real. It's not a social construct.
It's a biological reality. There are racial differences, real racial differences. They're much smaller than gender differences, but they're still real. But my point was the one that I made initially, which is for most Americans, people who are born here, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, doesn't matter of any race. The real concerns are economic.
And I do think that certain forces, the banks, people loaning the money, have a real incentive to foment dissent within the population against each other. Fight amongst yourselves while we continue to charge you 25% interest on your credit card. And as I said when we first discussed this, I noticed this after Occupy Wall Street, which was like the very first left wing movement that I thought, I kind of kind of like the the theme here. I mean, I wasn't you know, whatever. I'm not camping out on the sidewalk in front of JPMorgan, but the idea that you could have a global financial crisis and no one responsible for it goes to jail, and the only people who suffer are the people who took the loans, not the ones who issued the loans, I felt like that's just not fair.
And so I supported the idea of holding the creditors accountable for their crimes, and none ever were held accountable by Bush or Obama, as you know. And then I noticed, and this is measurable actually by Alexa's search of New York Times stories, that the term racist, racism, white supremacy, those exploded in New York Times stories and not just the New York Times, but the rest of the legacy media. And my interpretation of this fact is that the media was used to distract the population with
racial problems. Media,
Tucker. I well, I've already I've already said I have been part of many distractions. Took me a long time to recognize this. And I'm trying to be honest about it now. Now, again, there's been an enormous amount, particularly in the New York Times, but not just of anti white hate, which is, like, totally normalized across the American media.
Whiteness is bad. White supremacy is evil. Every other kind of ethnic awareness is great and celebrated, but white ethnic awareness is Nazism, etcetera, etcetera. This absurd and pretty malicious double standard. And that's annoying, and I've noted it many, many times.
But, ultimately, what I'm saying is that people care about their economic fortunes and their ability to pay their bills and secure a better life for their kids, and those things are way more important to most Americans I have met than anything related to race. And that's why all the stuff about whiteness being bad, which is like an outrageous slur if you think about it, all of that, in my opinion, was designed as a distraction from the fact that the American economy was becoming ever more pyramid shaped, ever more lopsided, ever more basically, ever less middle class. The middle class was no longer the majority after 2015. That was not even noted in most publications. And, like, that's a tragedy, and no one even said anything about it.
Instead, it was just like white people hate black people. Black people hate white people. You know? We got played. That's my view.
You brought up Occupy Wall Street and your affinity with that. And you said in our previous interview, the future that I imagine is not a future in which we're yelling at each other about race. It's a future in which people are legitimately revolutionary, maybe even violent on the basis of thwarted economic opportunity. And it made me wonder, do you believe capitalism is an evil system, a necessary evil, something else? And and, also, what do you mean about legitimately revolutionary?
I certainly didn't mean to endorse violence. I can't imagine I would ever I would never say that intentionally. I'm amazed that you have a tape of me saying that, and I just wanna disavow it. I'm not for violence, Period.
Okay.
It's against my religion, and so I just wanna be very, very clear that I'm totally opposed to violence. What I mean is the current system, and I don't know what you would call our economic system. I mean, I'm often told it's free market capitalism. It doesn't bear any resemblance to what I thought free market capitalism was. I'm not sure the name is important except as a way to mislead and bully people into being quiet about it, but any economic system in which, you know, the overwhelming majority of the rewards go to an ever shrinking number of people or or proportion of people is a doom system because it makes people revolutionary.
I saw this in Venezuela, which I visited as a child. It was a prosperous kind of first world country, beautiful country actually. And then it, of course, it proceeded along the path we're on, and the resentment built, and you had this very volatile combination of electoral politics, a democracy, and, you know, an economic oligarchy, and those two don't work well together. And you had a left wing populist takeover, Hugo Chavez, and and the results are are now well known. So I don't know what you call this, but it's not working, and it's making for a very volatile country.
You know? People have to own things. They have to be vested in the country in order to deradicalize them. But when people own nothing, they've got nothing to lose. I mean, these are very obvious observations.
Two last questions. You can dispute the premise, which I'm sure you will.
I don't know that I will.
But I wanna preempt it anyway just because I think in our in our brief time together
preparing me.
In our brief time together, I've I feel like I've I've come to understand a bit about you. Alright. I'd say two of the most seminal events in your professional life were, one, the Iraq War and, two, the election of Donald Trump. That's the promise. You were for both of them.
Now you say that they were both mistakes. So I guess, why should anyone after that track record listen to you?
People probably won't. You know?
But has it caused some self reflection about?
Oh, has it caused well, I I admitted it. So, of course, it has caused a lot of self reflection. And I wouldn't say, by the way, that the two thousand sixteen election of Donald Trump was a mistake. I I didn't mean to suggest that. I I was addressing this last year and, like, what what happened to the to the campaign promises that a lot of us repeated enthusiastically and thought were real.
But if you're saying that Donald Trump could lead this country to a nuclear war, which is essentially what you said could happen, then how could the twenty sixteen election of Donald Trump not have been something that you regret? Those two things I mean, if I was going to vote for someone who might lead us to a nuclear holocaust, I would perhaps reconsider my vote.
Well, I don't know I don't know if if you remember well, but that was that year was a choice between the lady who killed Qaddafi for no reason and turned Libya into a gaping wound, which it remains, for no reason, and then laughed about it, and a guy who said the Iraq War was a mistake. So for me, that was not even a close call.
I
mean, Hillary Clinton, particularly in foreign policy questions, was a grotesque neocon from my perspective. So I don't regret that. I'm grateful that he won in 2016. My only point once again was he campaigned against the things he's now doing a year and a half ago. So I I just apologized for repeating those campaign slogans as if they were true.
I thought they were true. They turned out not to be true, and I feel bad about that. You know, I'm often wrong. I say that, and I mean it. It's I'm not it's not a pose.
And I I do think last thing I'll say is I think if you force yourself to admit you're wrong, and I always force my four children to admit they were wrong, I didn't do a lot of spanking, the punishment I meted out was forcing them to admit that they had done something wrong. That's enough usually. I think if you do that, it makes you wiser over time, and you're less likely it doesn't mean you're not gonna make mistakes. I will make many mistakes going forward, I assume, but it you're less likely to fall for things once you've apologized the first time. And the thing that I noticed and that drove me so crazy about Washington that I finally left was the the cyclical nature of bad decision making.
They wouldn't just make bad decisions again and again. They'd make the same bad decisions again and again and again based on the same faulty assumptions, and they could do that because no one was ever held to account for any failure or disaster ever. The only people who were ever punished were the people who complained about it. And I watched that, and it drove me again, it drove me nuts. And I just don't wanna add to that.
I don't wanna be part of that at all. For all my faults, I don't wanna be part of that. So that's it. I'm not running for anything. And if, you know, people think I'm not credible because I changed my mind about the Iraq war or because I was shocked that Trump launched a war he said he wouldn't launch, I get it.
I understand why people feel that way. You know? I'm not mad about it.
This is my last question. It's a personal one. You know, I I talk to a lot of people left and right about you. A lot of them used to be your friends. I mean or they said they were close to you or spent time with you.
They're all mad at me now.
Well, they all say that you've changed.
Yeah.
Some say you've sort of become untethered from reality. And the question all of them had was what happened to Tucker Carlson? And it's something that I've heard echoed a lot. You're an object of a lot of fascination, continuing interest. You are at the center of a lot of our cultural conversations.
And I wonder how you would answer that question.
Well, I marvel at it, and I mean this sincerely. I don't find myself very interesting at all. I feel like I'm as transparent as I can be. So the idea that I've changed, well, yeah, I hope so. America's changed a lot.
And if you still think that making the world better is as simple as sending aircraft carriers to a foreign country, if you think the way to improve discourse is by banning words, if you think the vax is safe and effective, I don't know what to tell you. Have you not been paying attention? Apparently not. Or maybe you're just resistant to the conclusions, but it's really important if you advocate for something to watch, to stay patient, and see how it winds up. And if you spend a lot of time telling people this is true and then you find out it's not true, you have an obligation to say, I'm sorry.
I told you that was true, but it turns out it's not safe and effective, and regime change isn't that simple, and no, speech codes don't work or whatever you were advocating for. So, yeah, of course, I've changed. I mean, the changes that have taken place in this country since August 1991 when I entered the workforce are bewildering to me. I mean, so much has changed. So many of my assumptions have been blown up, just evaporated under the pressure of reality, that if I still clung to those, that would be shameful.
That would be dishonest, and I don't wanna be that.
Tucker Carlson, this has been so interesting. Thank you so much for your time.
Thank you. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
That's Tucker Carlson. After these interviews, we reached out to Carlson's representative to get clarity on his claims that senator Ted Cruz and ambassador Mike Huckabee have advocated for the murder of children and other innocent civilians. She responded in an email, quote, Gaza. When asked for comment, Huckabee replied that, quote, no sane person advocates for the murder of children or civilians and called the allegation, quote, sick and evil. Cruz replied that we should spend our time, quote, actually covering people who still matter.
We also reached out to Sean Hannity who denied that he pressured president Trump to go to war with Iran. Mark Levin denied this as well, and both Levin and Laura Loomer denied that they had ever been out to get vice president JD Vance. We also reached out to Rupert Murdoch and Miriam Adelson, but they did not respond to our request for comment. To watch this interview and many others, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel, and please do, at youtube.com/@ Symbol the Interview podcast. This conversation was produced by Wyatt Orm.
It was edited by Alison Benedict, mixing by Sofia Landman, original music by Marian Lozano, photography by Philip Montgomery. The rest of the team is Priya Matthew, Seth Kelly, Paula Neudorff, Jobel Munoz, Eddie Costas, Amy Marino, Mark Zemel, David Hur, Kathleen O'Brien, and Brooke Minters. Our executive producer is Alison Benedict. Next week, David talks with personal finance author and pod caster Ramit Sethi about living what he calls a rich life.
There are far too many people who go through life ultra frugal, and over time, their ability to spend money meaningfully atrophies.
I'm Lulu Garcia Navarro, and this is the interview from The New York Times.
No claim selected
Click an underlined phrase in the transcript to see the fact-check here.