http://archive.today/2025.11.15-105312/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/15/us/politics/tucker-carlson-fuentes.html
During three hours of interviews driving to and from a quail hunting site outside Fort Myers, Mr. Carlson was by turns indignant, reflective and seething — and thoroughly unrepentant for having roiled the conservative movement with the interview, or for his own escalating attacks on those who support Israel.
“Israel does not matter,” he said from behind the steering wheel, casually contradicting the view of Mr. Trump and every president before him, while his two spaniels sat in the back seat. “It’s a country the size of what, Maryland? It has a population of nine million. It has no resources. It’s not strategically important. In fact, it’s a strategic liability.”
Last month, Tucker Carlson’s genial interview with the white nationalist Nick Fuentes detonated a bomb that further fractured the Trump-era conservative movement he once helped galvanize. This month, Mr. Carlson decided to escape the wreckage for weeks of bird hunting in Maine, South Dakota, Nebraska and Southwest Florida.
In choosing not to challenge Mr. Fuentes’s antisemitism during their discussion on his popular YouTube show, Mr. Carlson focused furious new attention on whether he was deliberately mainstreaming views that were once embraced only on the fringes of American politics — and, in particular, whether he was seeking to further inject far-right ideology into the Republican Party as it begins to think about what it will stand for after President Trump leaves office.
On one level, the debate brought into focus by Mr. Carlson is about the line between free speech and hate speech. On another, it is about whether American conservatism needs to do more to expel racism and extremism from its dialogue and policies. The fissures over those questions are growing more pronounced among Republicans, a shift that is evident in the angry reaction among many on the right to Mr. Carlson’s handling of Mr. Fuentes and his increasingly vocal criticism of American policy toward Israel.
The interview was in many ways the culmination of Mr. Carlson’s growing feud with conservative fellow travelers. Long a standard-bearer for President Trump’s “America first” mantra, Mr. Carlson, 56, openly criticized the president in June for straying from his principles and for “being complicit in the act of war” by bombing three Iranian nuclear sites in cooperation with the Israeli government.
In the months following the airstrikes, Mr. Carlson continued to question Israel’s strategic value to the U.S. In early September, after the Turning Point USA conservative activist Charlie Kirk vowed that Mr. Carlson would still be speaking at the group’s events, a pro-Israel donor angrily revoked a $2 million pledge to Turning Point.
“I’ve never gotten along better with him,” Mr. Carlson said of the current status of his relationship with Mr. Trump. “He’s never been nicer.” But, Mr. Carlson conceded, his attacks on Israel, along with his gentle treatment of Mr. Fuentes, cost him friendships and led to death threats.
“I just want to be clear about this: I knew what would happen,” Mr. Carlson said of the reaction to his anti-Israel posture. “And I felt that, at this point in my life, I can take it. And it’s worth it, because I want to force a rational public conversation about what’s in our country’s interest.”
“The most dispiriting fact of the last nine months is that huge proportions of the institutional Republican Party all kind of hate free speech every bit as much as the left does,” he said. “They are every bit as censorious as some blue-haired, menopausal Black Lives Matter activist. And I just didn’t know that. And I’m disgusted. I feel betrayed. I take it personally.”
Mr. Carlson, who has often been derided for his claim that he is “just asking questions” when his questions center on conspiracy theories, is starting to find some conspiratorial answers. On a recent show, he described the race-related riots of 2020 as “a manufactured crisis” that had been staged in an effort “to effect broad social change.” In another episode, Mr. Carlson referred to the coronavirus pandemic as a “creation.” The Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol? “The whole thing was managed.”
Mr. Carlson has also produced a documentary about the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The U.S. government, he said, “had foreknowledge” of the attacks on the World Trade Center, as did “other actors.”
But Mr. Carlson said that his foremost concern is what he sees as America’s misplaced priorities. Instead of U.S. policymakers attending to domestic challenges like skyrocketing housing costs and a crumbling health care system, he said, “We’ve spent the last 80 years administering a global empire. It’s commanded a massive percentage of our attention and money. That’s the core problem, which no one wants to say.”
In particular, Mr. Carlson said during the interview, America’s devotion to Israel was misplaced. He scoffed at its characterization as America’s one abiding ally in the dangerous neighborhood of the Middle East, saying, “Israel is not only not our most important ally in the Middle East, I’m not even sure they are an ally.”
Mr. Carlson went on to say that he did not altogether blame the Israeli government for “trying to get what it can” from the U.S. Rather, he found fault with American leaders in both parties for “handing over their sovereignty to an irrelevant country in exchange for campaign contributions or, in some cases, protection from blackmail. They’re the ones I have contempt for.”
Mr. Carlson said he abhors antisemitism and that he has numerous Jewish friends who share his qualms with the Israeli government. Still, his characterization of the Jewish state as a devious manipulator leeching resources from a great power is a familiar trope that has aroused suspicions.
“At best, I’d say he’s antisemitic-adjacent,” said Matthew Brooks, the chief executive of the Republican Jewish Coalition.
For that matter, Mr. Carlson himself once offered a similarly skeptical appraisal of the conservative politician Patrick J. Buchanan — who, Mr. Carlson said* on a political TV program in 1999, may protest that he was merely speaking “truth to power” and may very well have Jewish friends. But, Mr. Carlson said, “I do believe there is a pattern with Pat Buchanan of needling the Jews. Is that antisemitic? Yeah.”
Mr. Carlson acknowledged that, on certain levels, he is not who he once was. “I’ve changed my opinion on almost every big topic over the years,” he said, citing in particular his previous advocacy of the Iraq war as “one of the worst things I’ve ever done.”
Mr. Brooks of the Republican Jewish Coalition compared what he called “the fawning way’’ that Mr. Carlson handled Mr. Fuentes with his openly hostile interview of Senator Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican, the month before. The two argued over Israel, Russia and the U.S. bombing of Iranian nuclear sites. Mr. Cruz wondered aloud about Mr. Carlson’s “obsession with Israel,” causing Mr. Carlson to respond that the senator was accusing him of antisemitism “in a sleazy, feline way.”
“I have contempt for Ted Cruz,” Mr. Carlson said as he drove back from the quail hunt, where he managed to bag six birds. “Not just in his public positions, but in the way that he lives.” (Mr. Cruz, in a speech the previous evening, said of Mr. Carlson’s interview with Mr. Fuentes that he had “spread a poison that is profoundly dangerous.”)
* https://xcancel.com/MaxAbrahms/status/1985355112144044107
