00:00:00.000I 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.
00:00:21.420So 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.
00:00:37.960And 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.
00:00:57.860They 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.
00:01:08.500All 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.
00:01:56.620It'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.
00:02:08.640And I am going to rise from the dead in three days, and so on. That's how it's traditionally understood.
00:02:15.220I 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.
00:02:25.080Unless we think that there's a prediction going on there. But anyway, I'll leave that aside.
00:02:30.140But 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.
00:02:43.100There was a man, Julian the Apostate, who's coming post-Constantine, post-Christianization, who genuinely wanted to return to paganism.
00:02:56.240And again, who, at least at first glance, would be the least likely to build the Third Temple? Maybe Julian.
00:03:07.060Because you would say, this guy, he hates the Jews, he hates the Christians, you know, he would never do it.
00:03:12.880But he actually did attempt it at great cost, but also, for honest, a little bit half-heartedly.
00:03:18.900He was involved in Persian campaigns. There were also all of these natural phenomenon that occurred, like earthquakes and so on.
00:03:29.360Now, divine or not, that's up to you, of course, but it is interesting.
00:03:33.320And so the project was abandoned. But I think what's so powerful about Julian, and this is where Tucker really lost me,
00:03:41.840was 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.
00:03:48.640Okay. 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.
00:03:57.560But there is something to this notion of a Third Temple. And from my perspective, I've almost come around to this Third Temple stuff.
00:04:07.640So hear me out. You know, if Julian did it, maybe it's good enough for me.
00:04:11.520Because 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,
00:04:21.120in the way that you can have beautiful statues to Venus that you can adore.
00:04:27.520This is your thing. And you Jews, you didn't like the idea of Yahweh in the pantheon.
00:04:33.760But okay, we'll compromise. We're going to center your religion.
00:04:38.420And in a way, he's enclosing Yahweh in that temple. He's saying that Yahweh can't escape because he's there.
00:04:47.480And there is something, you know, the thing that is most powerful about Judaism, as opposed to, I don't know,
00:04:55.780some religion in the Congo or whatever, is precisely because Yahweh's cup overfloweth.
00:05:03.680He's not confined to Jerusalem. He's not confined to his temple.
00:05:08.600He has expanded throughout the world to become the most dominant god of them all.
00:05:14.380He's, you know, in so many ways, through Christianity, most obviously, and Jesus-ism, let's say.
00:05:20.860He's expanded to Islam, the Islamic world. They are worshipped.
00:05:23.780They call him by a different name. They don't call him by Yahweh. It's Allah.
00:05:26.960Jesus might have called him Abba. I mean, if you spoke Arabic, you know, it expands into Islam.