RadixJournal - March 07, 2026


Emperor Julian and the Third Temple

Hosted by
Richard Spencer
Mentioned
Tucker Carlson Cyrus Pete Hegseth Nebuchadnezzar Jesus-ism Daniel Gospel Yahweh Venus
The Third Temple The Question of Professor Jiang

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

143.78

Word count

993

Sentence count

75

Harmful content

Hate speech

10

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Tucker Carlson rants about the need for a Third Temple, and why it should be built in the middle of the Old and New Testaments of the Dome of the Rock, and what it means for the future of Judaism.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 I have been railing against Tucker Carlson for some time, and I will in the future, but I would say that his last monologue was, in my mind, a little more coherent and interesting, in fact, and even compelling in a way.
00:00:21.420 So it was maybe Tucker at his best, and he was actually talking about the temples. And so you have the first temple to Yahweh that was, again, apparently built right where the Dome of the Rock is.
00:00:37.960 And this is destroyed by Babylon, and these stories are told in a few books. Daniel tells a story of the captivity, basically the Jewish community surviving among a few people, in a way, who are living in exile, and what they can do there.
00:00:57.860 They can interpret dreams. They can demoralize Nebuchadnezzar with visions of a collapsing colossus that is sort of him, that's going to be smashed by the rock, which is Yahweh. 0.95
00:01:08.500 All that kind of stuff, a lot of interesting things. But Babylon is taken over by Cyrus in Persia, and then Cyrus effectively frees the Jews, allows them to return to Jerusalem, and finances the construction of the Second Temple. 0.92
00:01:26.620 Which is very interesting.
00:01:56.620 It's in the Gospel of Mark, maybe the first Gospel, that this whole thing is coming down. And at least in the way that it was interpreted by Tucker Carlson, that I am the Third Temple, in a way.
00:02:08.640 And I am going to rise from the dead in three days, and so on. That's how it's traditionally understood.
00:02:15.220 I think it might, well, you might not like this, well, I think it might very well suggest that the Gospel of Mark was written much later, we thought it was written after 70 AD.
00:02:25.080 Unless we think that there's a prediction going on there. But anyway, I'll leave that aside.
00:02:30.140 But so he, Tucker then goes on to a story of this question of the Third Temple. And for a lot of time, the old temple was a dung heap. It was not maintained.
00:02:43.100 There was a man, Julian the Apostate, who's coming post-Constantine, post-Christianization, who genuinely wanted to return to paganism.
00:02:56.240 And again, who, at least at first glance, would be the least likely to build the Third Temple? Maybe Julian.
00:03:07.060 Because you would say, this guy, he hates the Jews, he hates the Christians, you know, he would never do it.
00:03:12.880 But he actually did attempt it at great cost, but also, for honest, a little bit half-heartedly.
00:03:18.900 He was involved in Persian campaigns. There were also all of these natural phenomenon that occurred, like earthquakes and so on.
00:03:29.360 Now, divine or not, that's up to you, of course, but it is interesting.
00:03:33.320 And so the project was abandoned. But I think what's so powerful about Julian, and this is where Tucker really lost me,
00:03:41.840 was when he said, oh, Julian, you know, he's a pagan, and if you want to rebuild the Third Temple, that means you're a pagan too.
00:03:48.640 Okay. I don't think so. I don't think Pete Hegseth is a pagan. I don't think Chabad are pagans. I think that's wrong. 1.00
00:03:57.560 But there is something to this notion of a Third Temple. And from my perspective, I've almost come around to this Third Temple stuff. 0.64
00:04:07.640 So hear me out. You know, if Julian did it, maybe it's good enough for me.
00:04:11.520 Because what Julian was saying, in effect, is that you will have a temple to Yahweh in the way that we have a temple to Apollo,
00:04:21.120 in the way that you can have beautiful statues to Venus that you can adore.
00:04:27.520 This is your thing. And you Jews, you didn't like the idea of Yahweh in the pantheon. 1.00
00:04:33.760 But okay, we'll compromise. We're going to center your religion. 0.62
00:04:38.420 And in a way, he's enclosing Yahweh in that temple. He's saying that Yahweh can't escape because he's there. 0.87
00:04:47.480 And there is something, you know, the thing that is most powerful about Judaism, as opposed to, I don't know,
00:04:55.780 some religion in the Congo or whatever, is precisely because Yahweh's cup overfloweth.
00:05:03.680 He's not confined to Jerusalem. He's not confined to his temple.
00:05:08.600 He has expanded throughout the world to become the most dominant god of them all.
00:05:14.380 He's, you know, in so many ways, through Christianity, most obviously, and Jesus-ism, let's say.
00:05:20.860 He's expanded to Islam, the Islamic world. They are worshipped.
00:05:23.780 They call him by a different name. They don't call him by Yahweh. It's Allah.
00:05:26.960 Jesus might have called him Abba. I mean, if you spoke Arabic, you know, it expands into Islam.
00:05:33.880 It even expands into philosophy.
00:05:36.960 And so all of these rationalist philosophers are saying things, you know, like,
00:05:43.340 there's no such thing as an uncaused cause.
00:05:45.460 There must be one unmoved mover, and his name is God, or whatever.
00:05:49.100 That's just another place where Yahweh travels.
00:05:52.300 He's gotten into the heads of philosophy departments.
00:05:55.480 He's gotten into the heads of Arabs.
00:05:57.020 He's gotten into the heads of Christians, whites, etc.
00:06:00.520 And I think what Julian was trying to do genuinely, it was sort of anti-Semitic on some level,
00:06:08.000 ironically, by building a temple to Yahweh, by saying, we're going to confine you here. 0.87
00:06:13.860 And so Tucker is saying, oh, to Christians, this is anathema.
00:06:18.760 To real Christians, you know, which is like whatever flavor he's become last week or something. 1.00
00:06:24.520 I take people at their word.
00:06:26.460 If you say that you worship Christ, this is the most meaningful thing in your life,
00:06:31.420 I take you at your word.
00:06:32.460 I'm not going to call you a heretic or something like that.
00:06:35.040 Real Christians do want to, many real Christians do want to rebuild the third temple. 0.99
00:06:39.380 Many find it anathema.
00:06:42.020 I think Julian was a fascinating man who was coming at it from his own perspective of confinement.
00:06:48.540 And I can sort of see how Christians and even Jews wouldn't like him too much.