The Tucker Carlson Show - Glenn Greenwald： Iran War Updates, False Flags, and Netanyahu’s Plot to Imprison Americans

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00:00:30.000 So for the last two weeks, you've probably been watching very carefully what's happening in the conflict with Iran.

00:00:38.040 The United States and Israel are engaged in a joint war against Iran.

00:00:42.820 And all of us are trying to figure out what's happening there.

00:00:46.460 But as our attention is diverted outside of our borders, it's also worth paying attention to what's happening here and in the rest of the West that is not directly connected to this conflict, but still affected by it.

00:00:57.440 And one of the things you notice is that our country, and certainly Europe and Australia, New Zealand and Canada, have all clamped down on their own populations in very unusual, unprecedented ways over the past year, but particularly since this war started two weeks ago.

00:01:15.980 And that's a familiar phenomenon.

00:01:18.840 Countries at war tend to become more authoritarian.

00:01:22.320 It always happens.

00:01:24.380 But we should be on guard against it.

00:01:26.520 And one of the ways it is happening in the United States is that free speech is being curtailed, your inherent God-given right to say what you believe in public.

00:01:36.300 That's the basis of the United States.

00:01:38.300 It's the very core of our Bill of Rights, of our founding documents.

00:01:41.340 It's the reason that we are exceptional in the world.

00:01:44.020 It's that one thing, our ability to say what we think, because that right comes from God, not the government.

00:01:50.640 That's what our documents say.

00:01:52.780 And so of all rights that we should be resistant to losing, that would be at the very top of the

00:01:57.960 list. And yet there is a concerted effort, as our next guest is about to explain, to strip that

00:02:04.140 right from Americans using both the pretext of war and the cover of war. And again, we should

00:02:09.300 be on guard against it. Glenn Greenwald has spent his entire professional life advocating for the

00:02:15.460 freedom of speech, has been punished for it. He has been analyzing carefully what's going on right

00:02:20.640 Now he joins us now. Glenn, thanks a lot for doing this. How would you assess the state of

00:02:25.700 free speech in the West right now? It is seriously in peril. It's often in peril,

00:02:32.620 but it's more in peril than ever before. And there are a couple of different reasons.

00:02:38.720 Obviously, there's been an attempt on the part of the EU to undermine the ability for people

00:02:44.980 on this populist right to express certain views. And there's been a lot of attention paid to that.

00:02:49.580 But the far more significant threat to free speech, and you and I have been talking about this, Tucker, since all the way back in 2023 after October 7, is the very concerted effort on the part of the Israeli government.

00:03:01.500 And in each of these democratic countries, they have pro-Israel lobbying groups, not as strong as the United States, but still very strong, that have overtly said that there's too much permissive language under the laws of these countries for what you can say about Israel.

00:03:18.120 And Netanyahu himself, just a couple of months ago, said that we're warning Western states, you better do more to protect the Jews in your country and you better heed that warning.

00:03:28.340 And ever since, and even there's been a spate of these kinds of things before that, but ever since, there's been a lot of draconian changes to just obliterating free speech in the name of protecting this foreign country.

00:03:40.780 The most brazen of which was, I don't know if you saw, but the Australians after Bondi Beach at the

00:03:47.180 insistence of the Israelis passed a law banning a whole bunch of common political slogans that

00:03:52.580 offend Israel, like from the river to the sea and things of that nature. And a bunch of Australian

00:03:58.280 citizens were angry that they're not allowed to express this political view any longer or else

00:04:02.900 they'll be arrested. And they went as kind of civil disobedience wearing a t-shirt that said

00:04:06.660 from the river to the sea, and each and every one of them was arrested and processed through

00:04:11.300 the court system. So when you see these sorts of things, these kinds of new speech codes that have

00:04:17.420 been promulgated, including the United States, a whole bunch of legislative frameworks that really

00:04:22.360 have no purpose other than to expand the definition of antisemitism that's existed for decades

00:04:27.480 to include a wide range of common criticisms of Israel or even of Jewish individuals,

00:04:33.480 That is an extremely serious attack on free speech, not in the name of marginalized groups

00:04:39.280 in our own country, but in the name of shielding this foreign country.

00:04:42.820 I just, the Australia story is so shocking that I didn't think it was real at first.

00:04:49.000 I talked to a friend in Australia who confirmed that it was, but it leaves so many questions.

00:04:52.980 The first of which is, how does a foreign prime minister have the power to tell citizens

00:04:59.020 many thousands of miles away that they're not allowed to criticize him?

00:05:03.220 And I think if you had asked me this three years ago, I would have had to have been delicate

00:05:08.240 because the answer is something a lot of people were unaware of or even taught was taboo.

00:05:12.960 But I think a lot of people understand now that these countries have very strong organizations,

00:05:18.480 activist groups, well-funded lobbies that are not loyal to the interests of ordinary Australians

00:05:26.480 or British people or Canadians or Americans, but instead are coordinating what these laws need to

00:05:34.000 be in the West in order to most effectively and aggressively shield Israel. And Bondi Beach was,

00:05:41.100 in fairness, a pretty horrific attack. There was two gunmen and Hanukkah celebration and

00:05:48.640 gunned down people. But since when in the West do we believe that the solution to massacres or mass

00:05:56.120 shootings, which happen all the time, is to immediately curb free speech and not only curb

00:06:01.220 it, but make it illegal to express a whole wide range of views. And it's not just Australia,

00:06:05.760 Tucker, it's happening. And I can go through every single example of which there are many

00:06:10.380 over the past two years, and especially recently, where very similar things are happening in Canada,

00:06:16.440 in South America, all throughout Europe, and even increasingly in the United States.

00:06:21.480 If I could just give one example, one of the most disturbing things, I think,

00:06:25.160 and it got very little attention, was that when President Trump got into office, he made

00:06:29.800 combating anti-Semitism a major priority across all agencies of his administration. They even have

00:06:37.200 an anti-Semitism czar who's very, very aggressive. And a bunch of regulations got passed saying that

00:06:44.060 if you criticize Israel, you're not eligible for these kinds of programs. And what Israel did about

00:06:49.220 10 years ago was promulgated this very new radically expanded hate speech code called the

00:06:56.140 ihra which is the international holocaust remembrance act and it takes very benign and

00:07:03.940 common views about israel or about jews such as israel is a racist society or uh you can compare

00:07:12.740 israel to the nazis or the jews played a role in in killing jesus a whole bunch of other kind

00:07:19.120 of criticism of either Israelis or Jews or Israel, and they banned it as hate speech,

00:07:25.620 which is, I thought, what the American right was so angry about for so long.

00:07:29.380 And when Trump negotiated, when he withdrew funding from a bunch of colleges on the grounds

00:07:33.700 that they were allowing too much anti-Semitism, every one of the negotiations required them

00:07:37.840 to implement this aggressively expanded definition of anti-Semitism so that even

00:07:43.720 professors of genocide and holocaust studies who have been teaching for decades decided that they

00:07:51.000 had to change their their reading list because it was now prohibited in the name of israel this is

00:07:55.700 america the first where the first amendment uh is still in place and and yet this is all over

00:08:01.600 academic institutions and they this all happened under the cover of combating wokeness combating

00:08:10.200 the left-wing death grip on American higher education, which is real. I mean, it's the

00:08:14.720 most real thing of all. But rather than break that grip, it hasn't been broken. It's still

00:08:19.420 in place completely. This was used as like an opportunity to restrict the inherent free speech

00:08:27.040 rights of Americans. And very few people noticed this. I didn't understand it was happening.

00:08:33.380 Because the problem here is that it's happening in our most elite institutions of higher learning.

00:08:40.200 our universities, our colleges, which going back to the Enlightenment, everybody agreed was the

00:08:45.600 one place where you needed completely unfettered speech and debate, including offensive ideas to

00:08:52.420 test things that had been declared taboo, to even dissect the most sacred orthodoxies.

00:08:58.760 The fact that these speech restrictions are happening on college campuses, I think is

00:09:03.840 is extra disturbing and destructive to free speech. And there's also, it's very hard to

00:09:14.540 pinpoint because there's been so many. You mentioned DEI. The Trump administration came

00:09:18.820 in promising to dismantle DEI. They did dismantle a lot of so-called DEI programs for Black people

00:09:23.680 for months recognizing this group or that group. But in many of these agreements, Tucker,

00:09:29.480 with some of the biggest universities, they included classic DEI requirements,

00:09:35.340 but not for black people, not for women, not for trans or gay people, but for Jews.

00:09:41.980 And there's a lot of these programs that say once a year, you have to have an event

00:09:45.740 recognizing the importance of Jewish life on campus.

00:09:48.740 You have to go recruit at Jewish day schools to try and get people who are Jewish to go to the

00:09:53.020 school. You have to create a whole office where people feel offended. And it's a series of rights

00:09:58.380 and agencies available only for Jews.

00:10:02.520 It is classic DEI.

00:10:04.200 So they dismantled DEI for some of the unfavored groups,

00:10:06.680 but created new DEI programs

00:10:08.520 for the ones that are most favored.

00:10:10.640 And that actually happened?

00:10:12.420 Why did no one on the right say anything about it?

00:10:14.820 Well, I didn't say anything about it.

00:10:16.160 Again, I wasn't aware,

00:10:18.020 and I should have been aware, it's my fault,

00:10:19.700 but I didn't know it was happening.

00:10:21.360 I mean, why did no one mention it?

00:10:25.020 I've been mentioning it a lot.

00:10:26.340 And there's some university associations very worried about free speech and scholarship that

00:10:32.960 have been active on it. But one of the things that happened is at the beginning of the Trump

00:10:36.900 administration, there was a zillion different initiatives. They really came in prepared to

00:10:41.000 their credit. And it was just one after the next. And I always felt like one of the most dangerous

00:10:45.400 ones was that they cut off university funding for all of our most important institutions.

00:10:51.340 And this government funding doesn't go to trans people in Armenia in the 17th century.

00:11:00.300 The reason our universities get government funding is because that's where the most

00:11:04.640 important advances in technology and in science are developed.

00:11:07.860 That's where the internet came from, was government funding of the internet research

00:11:11.280 at universities.

00:11:12.600 And they cut it all off and they said, you're not getting it back unless you'd agree to

00:11:17.560 all of our conditions.

00:11:18.540 and one of the main conditions was the installation of these heightened speech codes.

00:11:24.900 I hate speech codes that ban the airing and expression, not just by students, but by faculty

00:11:30.080 of all sorts of ideas, had nothing to do with the protest. They also forced the firing of Middle East

00:11:35.600 professors and chairs of departments who they deemed to be too friendly to criticism of Israel.

00:11:40.660 It was a remarkable assault on academic freedom at our highest and most well-regarded educational institutions.

00:11:49.660 And it was kind of done, as you said, with very little attention because there was this flurry of other stuff going on at the beginning of the Trump administration.

00:11:55.480 But if you go back and look at what those agreements were or what the DEI clauses are or what that IHRA hate speech code is, you will be shocked at the kinds of ideas that are no longer permitted to be expressed in classes, by faculty, in reading, in student debates, upon pain of being expelled or suspended or fired.

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00:15:03.820 it's it's shocking to me that that happened um and again i just want to apologize for

00:15:10.480 not understanding what was happening as it was but i have to ask about the pretext for it i mean

00:15:16.240 i hate seeing anybody hassled for his religion or ethnicity that jews christians hindus i just

00:15:24.400 don't like it okay and uh i i hate what a lot of you know agents of you know of neocon politics

00:15:32.380 are now doing with Muslims.

00:15:33.460 Hate all the Muslims.

00:15:34.120 I don't like that

00:15:34.740 any more than I like

00:15:35.600 hate all the Jews.

00:15:36.700 But I wonder,

00:15:37.700 was there massive harassment

00:15:40.700 of Jewish students

00:15:41.700 in the Ivy League?

00:15:42.600 Are Jewish students

00:15:43.320 underrepresented

00:15:44.280 at Ivy League schools?

00:15:45.820 Was there evidence

00:15:46.840 that they were systematically

00:15:47.780 discriminated against?

00:15:51.020 The ADL, about a year ago,

00:15:53.640 issued this statement

00:15:54.500 complaining that Hollywood

00:15:56.880 had adopted

00:15:58.320 all these diversity rules

00:15:59.860 for how many actors

00:16:01.080 you have to have

00:16:01.640 and directors

00:16:02.140 and whatever. And they complained that Jewish people were not among the minority groups that

00:16:07.300 were part of the diversity count. And they basically argued, not just implicitly, but

00:16:11.480 explicitly, that Hollywood has long been known for discriminating against or creating barriers for

00:16:18.300 the participation of Jews in various power sectors in Hollywood, which I think would come as a

00:16:24.880 gigantic surprise to anybody who has ever had any remote familiarity with Hollywood.

00:16:31.460 And the same is true at educational institutions. Go and look who the last seven of eight

00:16:36.260 Harvard professors were. They were all Jewish. John Mearsheimer talked about this. He's been

00:16:41.620 in academia for 50 years. And he said, I keep hearing that there's this problem with not

00:16:47.480 enough Jews or Jews being attacked. I've been in academia for 50 years. The idea that Jews

00:16:52.020 are underrepresented is so insultingly false. But the attempt to turn these educational institutions

00:17:01.140 into somehow bastions of anti-Semitism, even though they're filled with Jews at every crucial

00:17:06.780 level, including donors and administrators and professors and students, you always need a reason

00:17:12.320 to censor. You always have to cite some sort of crisis. But I think the key thing here, Tucker,

00:17:18.000 is that even if you believe those protests were anti-Semitic and harassing Jews, and

00:17:22.100 it was wildly exaggerated for so many reasons, we don't need to get into that. But these speech

00:17:27.860 codes I'm talking about that Trump forced the universities to adopt, IHRA hate speech codes,

00:17:35.040 they have nothing to do with protests. They're not about conduct. They're solely about ideas.

00:17:39.600 And I mean, I can just give you a couple. You're not allowed to say that the existence of the

00:17:43.680 state of Israel is a racist endeavor. You're allowed to say the United States is a racist

00:17:48.060 endeavor. You can say that about China or Japan or Iran, Norway, Indonesia, any other country on

00:17:54.060 the planet. In our schools, you're not allowed to say it's a racist endeavor. You're not allowed

00:17:58.180 to claim that Jews participated in the killing of Jesus. You can't draw comparisons between

00:18:03.740 Israeli policy today and that of the Nazis. You can compare American wars to Nazis,

00:18:08.440 any other country. It's all special protections of the kinds that we told we were

00:18:12.860 going to be done by. And there are so many more of these that are amazing that are just so

00:18:17.500 obviously protected speech, but no longer safely expressed in the college or university setting.

00:18:24.160 But it leaves America, just like this war, it leaves America unprotected. So, I mean,

00:18:30.440 not that these are protections and I would never, of course, support a law banning criticism of the

00:18:36.760 country that i own you know america we all own this country as citizens um so i would never

00:18:43.800 support those but it's just interesting that there's no criticism of the united states our

00:18:49.620 country that is banned or even discouraged only of a foreign country is that is that correct

00:18:56.140 there are no bans on your ability to criticize the american government american wars the american

00:19:05.820 founding. And that's what's remarkable. I was obviously vehemently opposed to

00:19:10.400 the kind of tsunami of left-wing censorship that happened in our elite university. I was on your

00:19:16.740 show many times to talk about why that was so dangerous. And I don't want to in any way justify

00:19:23.960 it. But what I will say is, at the very least, the ostensible pretextual argument for why we

00:19:29.600 needed censorship, anti-black speech or anti-trans speech, whatever, is because we were protecting

00:19:35.820 marginalized American citizens who belong to groups that were endangered. Totally false,

00:19:40.900 totally dangerous, but at least they were trying to ostensibly protect American citizens in the

00:19:45.800 United States. What's so remarkable about these new codes is they're only to protect Israel.

00:19:52.120 Imagine you go in and you're a citizen of Australia and you wear a shirt criticizing or

00:19:56.800 advocating for something with israel and you get arrested in your own democratic country of

00:20:01.340 australia it is bizarre tucker there's no other laws that that would be applicable to any other

00:20:08.880 countries it's only for this one country over and over and over and it also sends a very unsettling

00:20:15.280 message because censorship you know is always levied on behalf of the people in charge of course

00:20:20.460 The people to power are the only ones who ever pass laws telling you you can't criticize them.

00:20:27.320 I mean, of course.

00:20:28.920 And so what does this tell you?

00:20:30.520 I mean, what is this?

00:20:31.140 It's spooky.

00:20:31.880 I've never been the guy who runs around saying Israel runs the United States.

00:20:36.020 It's an overstatement, you know, but I certainly don't want to think that.

00:20:39.700 But like if you can't criticize a foreign country, then that country is in charge, right?

00:20:43.940 I mean, what other conclusion should I draw?

00:20:47.620 I can't really provide you with the cogent one.

00:20:50.140 I will say, I think, and it doesn't in any way justify or change anything you said, but I nonetheless think it's important to note that I think one of the reasons this is happening, and Mearsheimer and Walt, who wrote the Israel Lobby book back in 2007, the pioneering first ever real book about the influence of the Israel Lobby, they've recently talked about how, especially Mearsheimer, how back over the last several decades, it was very important for the Israel Lobby to act kind of in the shadows.

00:21:17.560 I don't mean that nefarious. I mean, they just didn't want it obvious that there was this

00:21:22.220 force that, I mean, like most lobbyist groups operate in the sewers and shadows of the Capitol.

00:21:29.740 But over the last three years, the pro-Israel lobby has had to come out into the open

00:21:34.660 so much more than ever before and really just be so explicit in calling everyone anti-Semitism,

00:21:40.220 advocating for speech restrictions. And the reason is, is because there has been a very radical,

00:21:46.400 and from an Israeli perspective, an extremely alarming collapse in support for Israel

00:21:52.720 among Americans in basically every demographic group other than conservatives over 50. So

00:21:58.780 basically like decades long box watchers, but even conservatives under 50 have all basically

00:22:04.660 now have majority opinions that are disfavorable to Israel. And you see some of what they've been

00:22:09.280 trying to do in response. Larry Ellison tried to buy TikTok, which was one of the perceived

00:22:14.240 sources where so many people were hearing about anti-israel criticism so they they they tried it

00:22:20.720 out of the hands of the owners and put it into larry ellison's hand you see the ellison family

00:22:24.880 buying cbs and news and putting barry weiss there there's an idf soldier at tick tock so these are

00:22:30.480 all desperate moves and i think the same is true with this very brazen attempt that they wouldn't

00:22:35.120 have done before so so out in the open try and censor american speech for israel but it's because

00:22:40.560 they feel panic, they're in panic. It's kind of a desperation. That spiral of support for

00:22:46.640 Israel among Americans, which had been utterly unthreatened for decades, is very rapid. And I

00:22:52.820 don't think it's ever going back. And I think a lot of these efforts as kind of just obvious and

00:23:00.540 with such a high potential for backlash are being pursued anyway, because they're just desperate

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00:26:16.300 Clones.

00:26:17.280 Either I'm misreading the goal or this is the dumbest campaign ever waged.

00:26:21.880 Because if the goal is to make people like Israel, this is having the opposite effect, of course.

00:26:29.740 So maybe, and it's, I mean, really having the opposite effect.

00:26:33.360 It's changing people's minds against Israel.

00:26:36.780 Israel is doing that.

00:26:37.960 And so you have to wonder, like, maybe that is the goal.

00:26:40.220 we saw the exact same thing many times but most recently with the left and you know in the wake

00:26:49.780 of george foyd and and me too they just started kind of frantically accusing everybody of being

00:26:56.020 a racist and a white supremacist and a misogynist and people got really you know that was peak woke

00:27:02.040 and people got really tired of it and and so many people were being accused that at some point it

00:27:06.620 just lost its meaning and people got angry about it nobody appreciates those who are trying to

00:27:11.200 stifle debate and there was a huge backlash in terms of people no longer caring about being

00:27:16.500 called racist because they drained it of all its meaning exactly the same thing is is so clearly

00:27:21.380 happening here and the of course there's going to be a lot of resentment the more people see

00:27:28.840 how much of a speech crack town in the west generally in the united states in particular

00:27:33.220 there is in defense of this foreign country. But again, I would just go back to the fact that it

00:27:38.000 was really the obliteration of Gaza, all the inhumane atrocities that we saw, that a company

00:27:44.480 did, that we saw literally every day, that we realized the United States was paying for under

00:27:49.860 Joe Biden and arming and funding. It really radically transformed how people think of their

00:27:54.060 own government and how they think of Israel. And I just think that this is all an effort to put the

00:28:00.720 cat in the bag because there's always been a perception that Israel's existence depends on

00:28:05.420 widespread support of the United States, and that is crumbling. I hesitate even to say this because

00:28:10.740 it pains me so, so much, but we've been doing shows together for a long time, 10 years,

00:28:17.180 and the basis of most of them has been free speech. It's the most American idea there is,

00:28:21.820 and it's the one worth dying for, and we both have always agreed on that. And you're a lifelong

00:28:27.160 figure on the left, I'm a lifelong figure on the right. And we both agreed that like the left was

00:28:32.600 the real threat to free speech because it was. Over the last year, the right seems every bit

00:28:40.600 as the right, whatever that means, like the Republican Party, I guess, seems every bit as

00:28:46.040 threatening to free speech, maybe even more so, maybe more effective in this attack on free speech

00:28:50.760 than the left. I really don't want to think that. It pains me to admit it, but I want to be honest

00:28:55.120 and I'm starting to believe that. Yeah, I wouldn't say it's because the left suddenly

00:29:00.960 had an awakening about the importance and virtues of free speech and the need to protect it. It's

00:29:05.780 really because they're out of power and the right is in power. And that, of course, is something

00:29:11.880 very common when people claim to believe in certain liberties and certain civil rights,

00:29:16.320 and they get into office and suddenly they find reasons to unravel it. But this has been going on

00:29:21.940 for a while. I think you mentioned how the hate speech codes at universities didn't get a lot of

00:29:26.740 attention. Another thing that never got a lot of attention, and it drives me very crazy to this day

00:29:31.160 because it's so preposterous and it really predates October 7th, I would say it's now up to 35 or 36

00:29:39.900 states in the United States, the vast majority of which are red states, but not all, that have

00:29:45.420 enacted laws that make it a requirement, if you want a government contract, that you certify that

00:29:52.120 you do not support a boycott of Israel. And a lot of people who had contracts before this law was

00:29:57.840 passed ended up getting fired because they refused. There have been hurricane relief aid

00:30:05.280 that cities have conditioned on signing a form that says you don't support a boycott of Israel.

00:30:11.580 There have been all kinds of firings in universities for people who criticized Israel.

00:30:16.700 So it's been developing for quite a while.

00:30:19.580 It's not like it just started.

00:30:20.940 Hurricane relief was predicated on a signed statement that you don't support a boycott for Israel.

00:30:27.560 In other words, you don't even have to be actively boycotting Israel.

00:30:30.780 But if you conceptually support it, you can't get hurricane relief, emergency disaster aid.

00:30:37.980 Is that true?

00:30:38.860 First of all, this is the kind of thing that I know people don't believe unless they go

00:30:42.040 look it up. It's so shocking. I know. If I didn't see it myself, I also wouldn't believe it. I think

00:30:46.760 if I heard that, I'd be like, that's a conspiracy theorist saying crazy stuff.

00:30:50.420 No, that actually is something that was instituted in many places. Different kinds

00:30:56.840 of language, but mostly it requires that you certify that you don't participate in a boycott

00:31:02.180 of Israel. In order to get a state contract or in order to get hurricane relief, there were

00:31:10.840 HHS regulations once RFK took over that were forced on by the administration that said

00:31:17.380 certain grants you can't get unless you certify that you're not supporting a boycott of Israel.

00:31:22.440 Talking about grants for research that would help Americans' health that then got conditioned on

00:31:28.380 this sort of thing. So this has been something that has been going on for a while. Let me just

00:31:31.940 say one other thing, Tucker? One of the people who supported that ban on people getting state

00:31:39.440 contracts unless they certify they won't support a boycott of Israel was Andrew Cuomo when he was

00:31:45.340 governor of New York. When he was governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo ordered the state to boycott

00:31:50.460 the state of North Carolina and the state of Indiana over anger because of their bathroom

00:31:56.500 bills, the trans bathroom bills. I remember that. So Cuomo ordered a boycott of American states.

00:32:04.120 Once these laws started proliferating, Andrew Cuomo embraced this and said,

00:32:10.980 if you boycott Israel, New York state will boycott you, meaning we won't do business with you.

00:32:16.420 This is someone who said, it's totally fine to boycott your fellow countrymen,

00:32:21.780 your states in the in the united states that's not only is it fine i'm ordering those boycotts

00:32:27.340 the one thing you can boycott any other country on the planet as well any other state any other

00:32:31.280 city you just can't boycott israel so many american laws in place that impose draconian

00:32:38.220 deprivations in the event that you're not able to certify that truthfully

00:32:41.940 it's it's beyond belief that they're uh not only states that did this the majority of states by

00:32:49.540 you're telling but that there's been no protest against it i mean because of course there's no

00:32:54.400 ban on boycotting the united states i mean our country doesn't play a role in any of this it's

00:32:59.760 like a foreign country of nine million people their interests determine whether you get a

00:33:05.440 hurricane relief or a federal contract like why has no one protested this it's just it you know

00:33:12.220 for a long time before october 7th especially there was just kind of a israel was sort of on

00:33:16.640 the back burner, but also, you know this very well, there was really a taboo. There was a high

00:33:21.660 career and reputational cost if you were going to talk about Israel and anything other than the

00:33:26.160 reverent bipartisan script that we always have to finance and arm and support Israel and go to war

00:33:32.120 for Israel. If you deviated at all, a lot of people paid a big price for that. So I think

00:33:37.380 there was just always, I've been writing about Israel and this sort of stuff and its influence

00:33:41.080 United States for 20 years. And there are many times when I saw things that I just couldn't

00:33:48.340 believe were real. And they were real. And as you say, they got very little attention because

00:33:54.400 there was a climate that convinced people implicitly or otherwise, you're better off

00:33:59.880 just not talking about Israel. There's a million other things you can go talk about,

00:34:03.200 leave the Israel topic alone. And a lot of people did it. And after October 7,

00:34:08.060 that just became unsustainable.

00:34:11.140 I mean, and I think after this war,

00:34:14.040 it will become unsustainable.

00:34:16.600 I don't think that any of this

00:34:20.000 can remain unchallenged

00:34:21.040 and some of it will be overturned.

00:34:22.920 And actually, let me just take

00:34:24.840 a quick side detour here and ask you,

00:34:28.220 this war is not popular.

00:34:30.640 I just want to say on the record,

00:34:31.840 I'm hoping for the best resolution

00:34:33.160 for the United States

00:34:34.700 because this is my country.

00:34:36.080 But it's not popular

00:34:37.180 And it hasn't been from the very first day.

00:34:40.420 In fact, the majority of Americans are against it.

00:34:42.420 But there have been no protests, no meaningful protests against it.

00:34:46.500 What is that?

00:34:51.840 One of the problems is that there's a constitutional framework that was created by the founders

00:34:59.520 that everyone can go read the Constitution in Article 1 says that Congress has the exclusive

00:35:03.780 right to declare war.

00:35:05.660 And not just to declare war, but other aspects of how those wars are conducted.

00:35:09.800 And there was a reason for it.

00:35:11.900 If you go read the Federalist Papers, if you go read a bunch of other stuff that was written

00:35:15.120 about it at the time, the reason is, is because wars are the singular, most potentially dangerous

00:35:22.800 thing, the worst thing, the most destructive thing that a country can embark upon.

00:35:27.580 And the people who end up having their lives at risk for it are the citizens of the country

00:35:32.420 fighting the war.

00:35:33.080 At least that used to be true.

00:35:34.020 that's no longer true, but it was true back then. And the theory was, if you're going to start a

00:35:39.080 war, you have to have the consent of the people who are going to actually be fighting in the war

00:35:43.080 or paying for the war or otherwise burdening themselves. And the way to do that is you have

00:35:47.420 the people, the branch that's closest to the American people is the Congress,

00:35:53.000 because they're elected, they're elected every two years. And that was why it was so important

00:35:57.840 to approve those wars. We've completely gotten away from that. Presidents believe in both parties

00:36:06.060 they can start wars, and they frequently do without any kind of attempt to gain congressional

00:36:11.100 approval. Obama started the war in Libya with no congressional approval. A couple days later,

00:36:15.640 the House actually voted on whether to authorize it. The House voted no,

00:36:19.420 we're not authorizing it, and Obama just went ahead and did it anyway.

00:36:22.820 So we've lost this idea that we're supposed to have a debate, that it's in the hands of anybody

00:36:26.860 other than the president. I think beyond that, though, traditionally, people have gotten really

00:36:33.380 angry about wars, have started protesting wars when there's a lot of Americans, well, deployed

00:36:38.540 in Vietnam by a draft. But even in Iraq, when there's a lot of troops coming home in body bags

00:36:45.480 or dying. And I think the idea is if we're just air bombing, just air bombing, if that's all we're

00:36:53.360 doing. It just doesn't provide the impetus for Americans to go out and protest. And also,

00:37:00.940 the big difference between the Iraq war and the Iran war for all the valid criticisms of Bush and

00:37:05.680 Cheney and Condoleezza Rice and that whole crew, at least they had a nationwide campaign for more

00:37:11.500 than a year to convince Americans that they should support the war in laying out the case.

00:37:15.240 It was filled with lies and falsehoods and all kinds of wrong and ignorant predictions,

00:37:20.660 but at least they did it. This war was just like, here it is. And there was no public debate,

00:37:28.460 meaningful debate about whether we should have a second war. It wasn't part of the 2024 campaign.

00:37:33.820 So I think it just happened so quickly. There was never really any consistent rationale or motive

00:37:39.460 as to what we were doing or what the goals were. And I just don't think that gave Americans the

00:37:44.760 fuel to protest. I think you will see that if this gets further out of control.

00:37:49.740 The gold industry bankrolls a lot of conservative media. Much of the gold IRA business is not

00:37:57.020 actually about selling gold at all. It's about selling massively marked up coins to people who

00:38:02.100 trust the voices delivering the pitch. Why is gold a hedge? I've decided to partner with the top

00:38:07.220 rated precious metals company. The companies have the exclusive control. They can manipulate the

00:38:12.640 price of the coins at any time. That's the dark side of it. What he said was you don't get as

00:38:17.880 much of a loss and they tend to really accelerate when the market goes up, which obviously sounds

00:38:23.380 too good to be true. We know this is happening because we talk to people who work inside these

00:38:27.680 companies. The reality is there is no regulation. And then we talk to people who lost their savings.

00:38:33.100 They were pumping this company and I trusted them. Even as the price of gold rises. It's so crushing.

00:38:39.760 It's a great gold scam.

00:38:43.300 Watch it now at tuckercarlson.com.

00:38:45.520 People are getting robbed.

00:38:46.840 We're sounding the alarm and we hope you will join us.

00:38:49.620 In the modern age, though, protests are organized.

00:38:52.900 And they're organized over social media or by text message.

00:38:56.400 And they're organized by groups with a stake in, you know, politically, whatever the outcome of the debate is.

00:39:02.620 So, you know, the Iraq war protests were organized by groups and the George Floyd protests were organized by groups that we could identify and paid for by companies whose names we know.

00:39:13.520 It's like they're there.

00:39:14.900 It wasn't just random Americans showing up on the National Mall to express their opinions.

00:39:19.500 They were bused in.

00:39:20.680 And I'm not criticizing that at all.

00:39:23.040 But that's not happening now.

00:39:25.760 So it's not just that Americans aren't engaged like they're opposed to it.

00:39:29.160 But there's no group on the left that seems interested in making a big deal out of this.

00:39:36.980 I just find that so weird.

00:39:39.980 Well, I think the other problem with it is that although there are a lot of Democrats posturing as being opposed, you know, when they go on like MSNBC or whatever, there's no real effort on the part of the Democrats in Congress to take any steps that would actually impede the war.

00:39:56.340 I mean, there was a vote about whether they needed authorization, and they lost that vote.

00:40:00.880 But the reality is that the Democratic leadership, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, they support

00:40:07.140 this war, especially Chuck Schumer.

00:40:09.660 They have no interest in doing anything like having votes on funding because they don't

00:40:16.400 think it's politically wise.

00:40:18.280 And when you have no leadership from the Democratic Party, which is supposed to be the opposition

00:40:22.680 Party, I think that also contributes to a reason why there's not a lot of nationwide protests.

00:40:27.740 You need leaders to do it. But again, I think the big issue was it just came out of nowhere.

00:40:34.640 You know, it wasn't like the Iraq war, or other words, where you had time to protest.

00:40:38.100 You just woke up one day and there was a true social post from Trump in the middle of the

00:40:41.660 night announcing the war, and then there was the war. Yeah. No, that's a really good point.

00:40:47.460 And so like so many of these changes, it was unheralded. It just happened.

00:40:51.160 And so back to the speech question, I know there was a not famous enough moment where

00:40:58.860 the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, who's, I think, been a pretty good governor in some

00:41:03.940 ways, but traveled to Israel to sign what looked like hate speech laws that are applicable

00:41:11.600 in Florida.

00:41:12.620 Is that a mischaracterization?

00:41:15.000 Some of his supporters denied that it actually happened.

00:41:17.320 Did it actually happen?

00:41:18.300 And what does it mean?

00:41:20.180 It did actually happen.

00:41:21.160 He actually went to Israel twice to sign laws in Israel that applied to people in Florida.

00:41:28.980 The first one was kind of benign and had some connection to Israel.

00:41:32.540 The second one, though, which was in, I believe, 2022 when he was gearing up to run for the Republican primary nomination,

00:41:41.500 a big part of what the strategy was, was they were going to get,

00:41:44.700 and they did get most of the hardcore fanatical Zionist groups and pro-Israel activist types and

00:41:53.620 pundit types, they lined up not behind Trump, but behind Ron DeSantis. And that was very much

00:41:59.260 a part of his strategy was currying favor with this crowd, which, okay, that's what people do

00:42:05.500 in politics. To go to, and I don't want to completely mischaracterize the law because

00:42:11.540 there is some you don't want you can overstate it but it absolutely was a law that took certain

00:42:17.900 speech and prescribed it not for the people in israel but for the people in florida and it was

00:42:24.820 about funding hate speech programs and again only about anti-semitism in israel and he went to

00:42:31.440 israel in order to sign it that was just true i can't i don't understand that either you know that

00:42:37.500 that that was not something that provoked a lot of outrage. Why is he signing bills for the people

00:42:43.120 in Florida in Israel when it actually can have the effect of confining or restricting the speech

00:42:49.160 of the people in Florida in relation to Israel? It seems like he was siding with this foreign

00:42:53.820 country over the citizens of the state that elected him. If nothing else, it's so humiliating.

00:43:02.580 It's so obviously humiliating.

00:43:05.020 I mean, I'm going to a foreign country to sign a law, any law that affects you in my state.

00:43:10.760 I mean, I'm just trying to understand the psychology here.

00:43:15.520 I mean, again, like a lot of the things you've just mentioned, I didn't really believe that could actually have happened.

00:43:19.980 So I wasn't as focused on it when it did happen.

00:43:22.640 I should have been.

00:43:23.500 My mistake.

00:43:24.560 But I'm wondering the thinking of like these Israeli government officials who pushed this.

00:43:30.400 There were some.

00:43:31.720 How did they think that helped them?

00:43:33.440 Didn't they think that would engender resentment?

00:43:35.580 How could it not engender resentment?

00:43:39.180 I mean, did it though?

00:43:40.820 Because, again, I think that there wasn't that much attention paid.

00:43:44.920 How many people really know that Ron DeSantis did it?

00:43:47.100 Every time I mention it, people who don't know are shocked and angry for obvious reasons.

00:43:53.900 But if this were something that were done in isolation, you could create some kind of rationale.

00:43:58.900 Again, Ron DeSantis.

00:44:01.080 was trying to be a pro-Israel candidate. Going there kind of does that. There's a lot of money

00:44:06.000 there. You have Miriam Adelson. It can be a campaign strategy. But the problem is that I

00:44:12.020 can point you to every institution, laws and hate speech codes. Do you know how many people got

00:44:16.500 fired after October 7th for expressing criticism of Israel or dissenting from the narrative about

00:44:22.620 Israel? Bill Ackman assembled blacklists for students who signed a petition blaming Israel

00:44:28.860 for the conflict in general. This was a huge crackdown on speech after October 7th.

00:44:34.720 People in media and journalism and art and everywhere got fired, including in, again,

00:44:41.060 in academia for the crime of expressing views about Israel that were deemed off limits.

00:44:46.660 And it is pervading our country. You can see it in every sector all the time. I mean,

00:44:53.800 I chronicle it all the time. So it's like most of them aren't available off the top of my head

00:44:58.080 because there's so many.

00:45:01.680 Where does this go?

00:45:03.380 Because this is totally incompatible

00:45:05.340 with our founding documents,

00:45:07.320 with the history of the United States

00:45:08.440 and with American culture itself.

00:45:10.340 It's too much.

00:45:11.880 And so it either becomes much, much worse

00:45:14.260 or it goes away.

00:45:15.040 I don't think we can stay where we are.

00:45:16.520 That's my instinct.

00:45:17.220 What's yours?

00:45:20.300 Well, I'm Jewish.

00:45:21.980 So when people talk about anti-Semitism

00:45:24.420 and the crisis of anti-Semitism,

00:45:26.420 that is something that I don't dismiss lightly.

00:45:30.000 Like, anti-Semitism is real.

00:45:31.560 It's been dangerous in history.

00:45:32.800 You know, like anti-Black racism, lots of other things.

00:45:35.760 And for a long time, there was this kind of victimhood mentality after October 7th

00:45:39.320 that Jews were uniquely endangered in the United States that I found very

00:45:43.300 unpersuasive, to put it generously.

00:45:46.700 But I do now think that when you have, you know, all these people who are loyal to Israel

00:45:54.380 buying up our media and putting IDF soldiers in charge of TikTok censorship and Barry Weiss here

00:45:59.040 at CBS News to kind of control the moderation. And on top of that, you have this war now that

00:46:07.560 that was for Israel, or at least in large part, Israel played a very big role. I mean,

00:46:12.480 even government officials mentioned that. Obviously, it was Israel's main adversary.

00:46:15.800 There's no denying that. That's when I really start to think that the more they try and

00:46:22.940 few this anti-Semitism accusation at everybody, the more they get more desperate as we were

00:46:27.740 talking about before and interfere in our American politics to try and have lockdowns and crackdowns

00:46:35.340 on our speech. The more Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham and all these politicians constantly

00:46:40.700 are talking about how often they're in Israel and saying that their main issue when they ran

00:46:45.260 for Congress was defending Israel. I do think that has a very high potential

00:46:50.220 of producing anti-Semitism because at some point people are going to be asking,

00:46:56.420 what is going on here? Why is there so much external influence on behalf of this foreign

00:47:01.640 country and who's doing it? That is something that worries me.

00:47:05.440 Well, I think all of us have every reason to be worried, and it's absolutely producing

00:47:10.620 actual anti-Semitism. I see it every single day when I go on the internet, which I try not to do

00:47:16.340 too much, but you can't avoid it. And it's real too. It's not just like, I don't like what Israel's

00:47:21.560 doing. AIPAC is bad, which I vehemently agree with. It's like Jews are bad. And it's not clear

00:47:27.580 to me exactly where all of it's coming from. I think some of it's inorganic, clearly. These

00:47:32.900 are basically ideological false flags. But I do think some of it is organic. I think some of it

00:47:37.840 is absolutely real. And I hate to agree with the ADL, but on the specific point, is anti-Semitism

00:47:44.980 rising in the United States? Oh, no doubt. And it's bad. It's totally bad. So that kind of gets

00:47:51.100 to my deeper concern, which is not about Jews specifically, it's about all Americans.

00:47:56.140 I feel like ethnic conflict is being encouraged in this country.

00:48:05.640 Yes. I mean, we have had ethnic conflict before and part of what I hated so much about the left

00:48:10.740 wing ideology and the way to express itself over the last decade was the fact that it just seemed

00:48:16.700 so maliciously designed to defy people based on these very primal, crude demographic groups and

00:48:27.040 to separate them and tell them to all go into their corners and to blame the others, which is

00:48:31.300 incredibly volatile and dangerous to do. And I think that if you turn on, I don't know how often

00:48:39.880 you do this but you know there's this whole like as you get older there's like these different

00:48:43.000 sectors of media and entertainment that you know nothing about because it's not for you

00:48:47.180 but i try and make an effort to pay attention to them you know there's all these like huge

00:48:51.300 celebrities but because you're over 30 you have no idea who it is right oh yes i'm familiar they're

00:48:55.960 super famous and you're like who's that um but i try hard especially when it comes to political

00:49:00.980 stuff to pay attention to like big streamers and that whole culture where gen z does politics

00:49:06.520 And you will be shocked if you go and listen to it or watch it for any amount of time, how common, how overwhelming anti-Israel sentiment is in a very aggressive way and how often it does kind of morph into, sometimes ironically, sometimes transgressively, but it's very linked to how people feel about Jews.

00:49:30.500 And let me just say one quick thing on this, Tucker, because this is such an important point that is hard to express on social media or whatever.

00:49:36.520 So one of the, in that IHRA hate speech definition that Israel promulgated, it ended up in the

00:49:45.160 criminal law and the EU, it's now in Australia, it's on our campuses.

00:49:49.480 One of the things that bans is conflating Jews and Israel, meaning if Israel does something

00:49:55.740 bad, you're not allowed to say, oh, this was done by Jews, because that is a conflation

00:50:01.760 that is considered anti-Semitic because you're blaming a bunch of Jews who had nothing to

00:50:05.420 do with israel for what you're criticizing right yet look how often the people who are on the other

00:50:11.420 side of that debate who love israel who constantly say they worry about anti-semitism they conflate

00:50:16.420 israel and jews all the time and i think this is the problem so if you say you know israel killed

00:50:21.980 you know 10 000 children they'll immediately say oh look blood libel he's accusing jews of killing

00:50:28.760 10,000 people or having raped soldiers. And no, you didn't accuse Jews, you accused Israel. But

00:50:36.060 when they conflate it in order to place criticism of Israel off limits to make it seem like you're

00:50:41.820 attacking Jews, even though you're not, that too is a very dangerous conflation that they

00:50:46.640 themselves are promoting. So that when people now think about Israel in their minds, because

00:50:50.820 they're constantly hearing it, that means Jews. So if they're angry at Israel, if they think Israel

00:50:54.400 did something disgusting, if they don't want the US funding Israel or Israel interfering,

00:50:58.760 that quickly becomes Jews.

00:51:01.140 And it's their fault,

00:51:02.120 the fault of the people

00:51:02.700 who are Israel supporters

00:51:03.600 in managing this discourse.

00:51:05.780 I couldn't agree more.

00:51:07.200 I think that's the original sin here.

00:51:09.600 I think it's very short-sighted

00:51:11.600 and dangerous.

00:51:12.520 If there were a self-identified

00:51:14.600 Christian nation

00:51:15.780 that was just for Christians,

00:51:17.060 there isn't one,

00:51:17.780 but if there was,

00:51:19.340 I'd be like,

00:51:19.800 yeah, go Christian country.

00:51:20.900 I'm Christian.

00:51:21.660 And then if that country

00:51:22.760 started behaving in ways

00:51:23.980 that were brutal and outrageous

00:51:25.560 and deceptive

00:51:26.580 and started killing people

00:51:27.780 because of their bloodline,

00:51:29.720 really behaving in ways that were impossible to defend.

00:51:33.400 And they started filling my airwaves with propaganda

00:51:36.460 about how every Christian has to be loyal to this country

00:51:39.000 doing things that are nauseating to me.

00:51:41.600 I would feel, first of all, I'd be outraged by that.

00:51:44.400 Don't do that in my name would be number one.

00:51:46.620 And number two, I would feel threatened.

00:51:48.840 I would feel physically endangered by that.

00:51:51.340 Why are you tying me to this?

00:51:52.600 I've got nothing to do with this.

00:51:54.160 I mean, I would, I think.

00:51:55.840 Well, that was very much what happened after September 11th. There was this huge danger that because some Islamic groups or Islamic countries had participated in this horrific attack that all Muslims were going to be blamed.

00:52:08.940 And so many Muslims had all sorts of different views. You're talking about hundreds of millions of them or a billion. And one of the things George W. Bush did, to his credit, was work very hard from the start to say, no, we're not at war with Islam. This isn't Islam that did this. This is this distorted version of Islam.

00:52:25.620 And that, I think, is exactly what we're seeing now is it's such an important rhetorical tool to say Israel is the state of the Jews.

00:52:33.600 Oh, look, Tucker Carlson said this horrible thing, even though you said it about Israel, about the Jews.

00:52:38.820 And this constant conflation, for the reasons you just said, is exactly what if you're in that group being tied up to this nation state, you should fear more than anything and combat as passionately as you can.

00:52:51.640 I mean, you must feel that.

00:52:53.300 Well, I guess you're maybe in a separate category because you are Jewish, but you have you had the same views for your entire professional life and you've been very vocal about it.

00:53:02.600 But I mean, this must be a like a real concern for a lot of people who aren't against Israel, but are not on board with the Netanyahu government.

00:53:11.740 And they're somehow tied to this against their will.

00:53:15.120 like oh yeah i mean you know if you're gonna have this foreign country and this is what i was

00:53:24.700 getting at before exerting massive amounts of influence inside another country you better make

00:53:31.080 sure that you're doing it in a way that's very subtle that's fairly visible you know and that

00:53:36.260 they were always doing that and that's why they were so angry at meersheimer and wald's book you

00:53:40.720 go back and if you don't remember look at the just the absolute uh attacks on them uh they people

00:53:47.800 lost their minds uh about that book because it dragged into the light something that was always

00:53:52.340 supposed to be secret the problem now is it's not secret the desperation and panic have made them

00:53:57.940 have to come out into the light and be very open about what they're doing and people see it and

00:54:03.640 if you're going to just sit there and be very visible and vocal and all over the place about

00:54:08.460 how we have to change our laws or restrict speech and everything else, fire people to defend this

00:54:13.600 foreign country or protect this foreign country, the outcome is going to be very predictable. And

00:54:17.940 I think you're seeing a lot of that. So just back to the previous question,

00:54:22.220 because you don't just cover principles and ideas, but politics and have for a long time.

00:54:26.900 Where do you think this goes politically? What does the country look like? We've got midterms

00:54:31.380 this fall. Two years from then, we have a presidential election. Clearly, there's going

00:54:35.420 to be a realignment the neocons have intentionally blown up the trump coalition they hated it from

00:54:40.780 day one because it was quote america first which obviously precludes putting israel first so they

00:54:45.140 wanted to destroy the coalition they have where do things land given those facts

00:54:51.560 you're already seeing this major transformation actually well on its way if not coming soon to

00:55:01.300 its conclusion in the Democratic Party, where it's becoming almost untenable for candidates in

00:55:08.700 the Democratic Party, including incumbents to run, especially in primaries, if they're too

00:55:13.300 supportive of Israel, if they accept AIPAC money. This transformation is close to complete. That is

00:55:20.600 not going to be reversed. And what made the Israel lobby so powerful for so long was that it was

00:55:25.060 more than anything else, bipartisan, unfailingly bipartisan. It wasn't one party or the other.

00:55:29.960 netanyahu kind of destroyed that but there was still a lot of pro-israel supporting democratic

00:55:34.660 party that's gone and i think if i were israel and i were you know a israel firster in the united

00:55:41.820 states primarily concerned with the standing of that country in the united states the thing that

00:55:46.440 would alarm me the most is that this is now happening on the right i can't imagine a 2028

00:55:51.220 primary campaign in the republican party that does not prominently feature this question and

00:55:57.340 And I also can't imagine that there's not going to be somebody like a major candidate

00:56:01.840 who's not purposely occupying that lane of saying, we were told that we weren't going

00:56:08.840 to have any more foreign wars or foreign attachments.

00:56:11.160 One of the major problems is Israel.

00:56:13.240 We don't hate Israel.

00:56:14.580 We don't have anything against it.

00:56:15.800 We just need to stop being responsible for funding it and fighting wars for it.

00:56:19.960 And I think that's going to have a lot of appeal.

00:56:21.640 So it's always going to take the DC establishment very long.

00:56:25.100 I don't know if Susan Collins is walking around.

00:56:26.920 and she promised she was going to only serve two terms. I think she's seeking her seventh.

00:56:31.380 And somebody went up to her and said, what about all these dead people in Gaza that you paid for?

00:56:36.280 And she just stumbled into her car very dazed because of her age. And she just uttered this

00:56:41.180 cliche, I'm pro-Israel. And so you have this older establishment generation that's never

00:56:48.060 going to change. It's programmed in their brain. But you see the trend so clearly,

00:56:52.780 not just in the Democratic Party, but in the Republican Party, where this issue is transforming

00:56:57.420 and not slowly, but rapidly. Well, this is why the neocons so hated Charlie Kirk,

00:57:04.240 because he saw this happening. And I remember you and I did an interview at my house this summer,

00:57:09.680 and you explained a lot of your views on this topic on Israel and were immediately, you know,

00:57:15.940 they leaked a tape to try to embarrass you. And one of the very first people to defend you in a

00:57:21.640 heartfelt way was Charlie Kirk. And I was actually maybe emotional watching it because it was just

00:57:27.080 so principled and it was so not what you expect. And he did it at actual personal cost to do this,

00:57:32.740 but he really meant it because he could see that you and he, while you have differences,

00:57:37.880 were basically seeing the same picture of the future of America, which is like,

00:57:42.500 let's help the country. And they hated that. I'll never forget that as long as I live.

00:57:47.880 yeah i mean you know charlie and i have had a lot charlie was a super interesting

00:57:52.840 yes independent subtle thinker and i know everybody on the left if you say anything

00:57:58.660 good about charlie kirk they're maybe going to get enraged i don't really care at all i think

00:58:02.260 we are missing like not just emotionally but very substantively and in a very compelling way the

00:58:08.680 presence of charlie kirk when it comes to this war and related issues and you know we i mean he

00:58:14.780 was very supportive of the Snowden reporting and free speech. We had a lot of that in common,

00:58:17.600 but also this question, and I talked to him as he was evolving. And one of the most disgusting

00:58:22.940 things I've ever seen, Tucker, was for a long time, Charlie Kirk was very pro-Israel.

00:58:29.720 And he obviously started questioning that in all sorts of ways to the point that he was

00:58:33.440 refusing to de-platform you, even if it meant the loss of donors in the millions of dollars

00:58:39.320 who didn't want anybody questioning Israel or criticizing Israel on the stage.

00:58:43.140 And he went out in interviews, including on his own show and a big one with Megyn Kelly,

00:58:47.400 where they both said, what is going on here? We need to start questioning this, but they try and

00:58:54.860 make it so that you can't because you'll have your reputation destroyed because they will call you

00:58:59.100 anti-Semites. And one of the things Megyn said that I really think was observant and perceptive

00:59:06.680 was that Charlie represented younger conservatives, 18 to 32 or whatever the age group was.

00:59:15.180 And overwhelmingly, they are turned against Israel. And he couldn't just be this hardcore

00:59:20.320 fanatical pro-Israel champion. He had to acknowledge that the debate was opening and

00:59:26.560 had to open that debate. And when he did, he himself started not abandoning Israel,

00:59:31.500 not becoming anti-Israel at all, but clearly being skeptical of US support for it.

00:59:37.360 And I will never forget that within seconds or minutes after he died, Benjamin Netanyahu was

00:59:43.860 all over American media for that day for hours and then for days after on every network he could find

00:59:51.240 talking about how Charlie was the most stalwart, devoted Israel loyalist that the United States

00:59:57.560 has ever produced. And that was a very strange development, but it was also a very propagandistic

01:00:03.220 one to try and prevent people from remembering that even Charlie Kirk was having serious second

01:00:08.340 thoughts about the whole Israel issue. Well, he defended you really at a moment where he did not

01:00:14.260 need to say a word about that. You're traditionally a very famous man of the left. So it's not like

01:00:19.420 he was not pandering to his own audience. Obviously, he was enraging his donors. They

01:00:24.600 were already enraged with him. But there was just no reason for him to do that other than

01:00:29.800 heartfelt conviction. Principal. Principal. I felt that was one of the bravest things I have

01:00:35.220 ever seen in American politics. It was basically ignored. But I just want to say that out loud

01:00:39.980 because that revealed who he was. Like in a moment, you can just stay silent and just not

01:00:44.200 say anything. He like stopped and said, I just want to say, Glenn Greenwald, well, we disagree

01:00:48.240 on some things. We have different orientations. He is a good man. And this is a political hit on

01:00:53.520 him. And that was about Israel. I mean, you had just, I mean, I think that's why that hit happens

01:00:57.620 because of Israel, but whatever the cause he did that. And that tells you everything about what he

01:01:03.320 was thinking at the time and why he was so hated by the neocons and to see them get up and be like,

01:01:08.080 oh, he was my best friend. Okay. Not true. Yeah. You know, this topic for so long, Tucker has

01:01:16.640 relied on a climate of intimidation and bullying and coercion. And it's not just that you get

01:01:21.300 criticized, I can show you hundreds of cases of people being fired before October 7th in the

01:01:27.940 United States for stepping out of line in Israel or losing funding or all sorts of other ramifications.

01:01:34.400 And most people, if they're being, I guess, self-interested or pragmatic,

01:01:40.780 may be well advised to avoid it because they just figure, oh, I have a lot of other issues

01:01:45.680 and problems. I don't need this one. And the fact that Charlie not only was doing it with Israel

01:01:50.780 before that happened with me,

01:01:53.300 but on the day that it happened,

01:01:55.180 stood up and so emphatically defended me

01:01:58.980 and implied some of the problems

01:02:01.240 or the causes that probably led to it.

01:02:04.380 Yeah, I remember seeing that

01:02:05.880 and I was really moved as well.

01:02:07.620 Oh, it made me emotional.

01:02:08.900 I'm not even connected to it.

01:02:10.040 I was friends with both of you.

01:02:12.640 So do you think that,

01:02:15.240 I mean, we're guessing now,

01:02:16.920 but we're also extrapolating forward

01:02:18.180 based on what we're seeing right now.

01:02:20.780 Do you think that what's this conflict with Iran, which has revealed so much, and we pray it goes

01:02:27.720 well, but if it continues on its current course, does it kind of reorient the two parties? Does

01:02:35.520 it shake up the system? People keep saying, no matter who you vote for, you get President

01:02:39.800 Netanyahu, and there's some truth in that. I mean, let's stop lying. There's some truth in that. The

01:02:43.460 big decisions are influenced, if not made, by a foreign leader. Does that end after this? And if

01:02:49.060 so how? There have been presidential debates in the past 30 years, most recently probably,

01:02:56.080 or vice presidents once as well, where the two party candidates when it came to Israel started

01:03:00.340 arguing about who was more pro-Israel. That's typically the limits of the debate that we've

01:03:06.020 been permitted to have. One of the things that I'm so amazed by, and maybe I'm being naive here,

01:03:13.820 but it's very frustrating and shocking at the same time. The Iraq War was one of the worst

01:03:20.640 debacles, probably the worst American debacle in our lifetime. You had the 2008 financial crisis

01:03:25.460 and all the other things, but that was what led to this whole unraveling of trust and faith in

01:03:29.940 the integrity and reliability of American institutions that has caused so many things

01:03:35.640 after that, but also just what it did to that region itself. All the lies, the credibility

01:03:41.240 leave the United States with those lies. Everything that we were told would happen,

01:03:44.460 none of it happened. It gave rise to ISIS. Everybody acknowledges it was one of the worst

01:03:48.840 actions in American history. And yet here we are 20 years later, and the thing that has really

01:03:56.140 amazed me was to the extent there was any kind of attempt to have a debate about the Iran war

01:04:01.460 to justify it, it was based on exactly, exactly the same tactics, the same script, the same rhetoric,

01:04:09.340 the the same jargon the same twisted rationale and often the same people who sold the war in

01:04:18.180 iraq back in 2002 and 2003 i i saw a fox news clip they like excavated condoleezza rice from

01:04:27.300 some like underground lair or bunker or whatever in which she works these days and they put her

01:04:33.380 on brett baird did and she gave like this five minute speech about how we have to go to war in

01:04:37.780 Iran to make sure they don't have weapons of mass destruction and nuclear weapons and they

01:04:42.240 fund terrorist states and will bring freedom and democracy, exactly verbatim what she was saying.

01:04:48.040 And the debate has almost been identical. So I want to say, yeah, if this war goes really bad,

01:04:53.820 it'll create this gigantic realignment. And maybe it will as part of these developments that these

01:05:00.760 events that led up into the Iran war, including the Israel stuff we're talking about, could create

01:05:03.980 to realignment. But I don't know. I thought that we would never live through, you know, a very

01:05:10.600 similar, if not identical, new war to the Iraq war. And yet here we are doing exactly that in

01:05:15.800 ways that aren't even pretextually different. Like they're not even changing the script or

01:05:19.960 the cast of characters. Literally. And I guess one of the lessons I learned from the Iraq war

01:05:27.180 is that, you know, the groundwork is always laid for big changes and you sort of see it being built

01:05:33.760 but you don't really believe it's going to happen.

01:05:37.800 I remember being at the White House right before the start,

01:05:40.760 you know, like in February of 2003.

01:05:44.540 And someone told me, yeah, we're about to invade Iraq.

01:05:47.040 And of course, I'd been advocating for it, shamefully,

01:05:50.480 but I didn't really believe it was going to happen.

01:05:53.380 Even though I was like on the side of it,

01:05:55.360 I thought that's too crazy.

01:05:57.160 Like that can't actually, they had nothing to do with 9-11.

01:05:59.440 Like, so why are we doing this?

01:06:01.180 And this person's saying, well, of course we're doing,

01:06:03.240 I'm like, what do you think this is?

01:06:05.140 And so with that lesson in mind,

01:06:07.400 when the ship started steaming toward the Persian Gulf,

01:06:09.720 I was like, oh, it looks like we're going to have a war.

01:06:11.520 To take that same principle and apply it to the IHRA effort,

01:06:18.140 you know, the effort to constrain free speech

01:06:20.180 and to ban and to make illegal certain expressions

01:06:23.560 of conscience and opinion.

01:06:25.920 Like, do you feel like we're getting to a place

01:06:27.580 where people are going to be arrested in the United States

01:06:29.800 for their opinions?

01:06:33.240 The one thing we have is the First Amendment, which we should be very grateful for because

01:06:41.120 if it were time to create a constitution now, we would not have that. And one of the ways I know

01:06:46.320 that is that I'm very familiar with a lot of other countries, including one I live in,

01:06:50.460 where that doesn't exist. The UK doesn't have it. Obviously, all throughout Europe doesn't have it.

01:06:55.280 But it is already happening in other countries. There were two bands in the UK that did a concert

01:07:05.260 and one of them said, death, death to the IDF. Not death to Jews, not even death to Israel,

01:07:12.800 death, death to the IDF, the military of Israel that was fighting a war.

01:07:18.800 And another one sang a song about Hezbollah and Hamas. They were criminally charged with terrorism.

01:07:25.280 The courts ultimately just in the last week threw it out.

01:07:28.860 We just saw the woman being arrested in Australia.

01:07:32.220 This is absolutely the trend.

01:07:33.800 In the West, over the past, I think the galvanizing event was the dual traumas of Brexit and then Trump's victory in 2016 over Hillary that made Western elites think we cannot tolerate any longer.

01:07:48.420 Free exchange of ideas on the internet, dissemination of news.

01:07:52.440 And it's just too unpredictable and it causes too many dangerous outcomes that are out of our control. But for sure, this is the trend in so many ways. And yeah, the West is abandoning very aggressively their belief in free speech, not as some absolutist concept in the way that I might affirm it, but just the basic notion that you can't be punished by the state for the expression of political views.

01:08:22.440 i mean that is the rule everywhere in the world i think i don't know that there is a country in

01:08:28.640 which free speech exists except the united states and i and it's as we've been talking about for an

01:08:35.260 hour it's it's definitely under attack but do you despite the fact we have a first amendment we have

01:08:39.580 all kinds we have a fourth amendment too and it's routinely ignored i've been the subject of you

01:08:44.280 know it's violation and you have too so like amendments to the constitution the bill of rights

01:08:49.760 is ignored routinely, do you think it's possible that the First Amendment will be overridden

01:08:55.800 by the state to punish people for having opinions the state doesn't like?

01:09:02.700 Again, this is going to sound probably naive, but this is actually what my immediate reaction to it

01:09:09.800 is. If you go to law school, which of course every judge in the federal judiciary does and

01:09:17.840 has done, and you study the history of jurisprudence or whatever. The idea that the First

01:09:25.000 Amendment is the crown jewel of American rights and constitutional liberties is so indoctrinated

01:09:34.640 into your brain. And it is before that as well. One of the things we were taught is that the

01:09:39.240 reason America is exceptional, the reason America is different is because we have the right to say

01:09:43.040 things without being punished and other countries don't. This is something that's inculcated in our

01:09:47.360 culture for so long. So I'm sure there will come a day when judges will start to retreat from that.

01:09:54.540 But for the moment, you've seen some actually good cases where judges draw a line pretty

01:10:00.520 rigorously. No, the state can't do this. The problem is that so much of the censorship now

01:10:07.640 is through big tech companies, it's through online. And there are ways to circumvent it

01:10:13.740 increasingly. And I do also think that, you know, if these Western liberal democracies start

01:10:18.420 embracing a true aggressive form of a framework of censorship, you have political changes in the

01:10:24.900 United States and I could easily see them starting to find ways to circumvent it too. None of these

01:10:28.800 things are permanent. None of them are guaranteed. You know, you have rights that you think are

01:10:32.320 guaranteed on a parchment and I've seen it many times. So as everybody who studies history,

01:10:36.460 it's gone the next month or the next year, even though none of the processes to get rid of it

01:10:40.720 were invoked right that's right or you know and you see this also in a lot of countries where

01:10:47.080 the husk of the old system remains in place the roman senate is still you know gathering

01:10:51.680 but it's not a legislative body anymore it's a symbolic body or whatever it's its existence

01:10:56.840 is designed to bolster authoritarian power it's not a counterbalance against authoritarian power

01:11:03.340 like you see that i mean it's judges in zimbabwe still wear wigs

01:11:07.840 yeah um and in the uk too uh let me just add one thing is that even though i was i came kind of

01:11:17.060 gave a rosy-eyed optimistic answer but i wanted to dance it was it might have been uh naive when

01:11:22.040 it comes time to war for war ever all bets are off and we've seen that in a lot of wars um in

01:11:28.980 the middle of the war on terror newt gingrich wrote this article saying it's time to uh repeal

01:11:33.460 and limit the First Amendment.

01:11:36.440 There have been all kinds of measures

01:11:37.980 designed to, you know,

01:11:39.600 accepted by courts.

01:11:40.820 I mean, you can go find it.

01:11:41.660 It's online.

01:11:42.120 It's like 2006,

01:11:43.420 we're fighting for the American way of life

01:11:44.840 and our rights and liberties.

01:11:45.700 And he's like,

01:11:46.200 repeal the First Amendment.

01:11:49.600 But war is when things get really scary

01:11:52.440 because people, you know,

01:11:54.480 all of war propaganda is so effective.

01:11:56.800 If you look at it rationally,

01:11:58.020 you can deconstruct it transparently,

01:12:00.400 but you don't really react

01:12:01.360 to war propaganda rationally.

01:12:03.240 it's designed to trigger our most primal instincts of tribalism and patriotism and

01:12:09.960 getting bad guys and feeling noble. And when that happens, people do start to think that

01:12:16.900 if you're criticizing the war a little bit too excessively, if you're questioning the real

01:12:21.680 reasons for the war, that this is somehow not just a irresponsible or destructive opinion,

01:12:27.260 but it starts to ease into sedition or treason. We've seen this a lot in many different American

01:12:34.900 wars. And I do think there's kind of a sense of seeing that now. I mean, not so much that I can

01:12:40.720 point to somebody convicted or charged with sedition, but there's a lot of sentiment going

01:12:45.680 around, not just from random accounts, but in mainstream ones that this needs to happen.

01:12:50.280 Well, as you said earlier, when things change is the moment at which lots of Americans die.

01:12:56.640 And that's why 9-11 was the most profound thing

01:12:59.100 to happen in our lifetimes

01:13:00.260 because 3,000 Americans died on camera.

01:13:02.840 And it was just like the worst thing anyone,

01:13:04.400 still the worst thing I've ever seen.

01:13:05.800 And I think every American felt that way.

01:13:07.400 And so at that point,

01:13:08.940 it gives the people in charge license

01:13:11.300 to do things they would not be allowed to do,

01:13:13.500 like create TSA or whatever, invade Iraq.

01:13:17.580 And so are you concerned that, you know,

01:13:22.440 there could be attacks here in the United States?

01:13:25.060 And like, what then?

01:13:25.960 i feel like there was already in the talk in the united states that at austin shooting for we

01:13:34.580 haven't heard much about it but it seemed pretty clearly linked yeah to the iran war and if it

01:13:41.300 goes on i would be very very surprised if there are others which again i think means that not

01:13:48.660 only are we fighting a war for the benefit of citizens in another country we're doing it

01:13:53.740 by endangering the citizens of our own country

01:13:56.940 for so many different reasons.

01:14:00.120 And I do think if it gets to the point

01:14:03.880 where this really gets out of hand

01:14:06.280 and you start to see mass casualty attacks

01:14:08.940 in the United States,

01:14:10.560 the history of the United States

01:14:11.940 and other countries leaves no doubt

01:14:13.760 that emergency measures will be instantly imposed

01:14:16.920 and those emergency measures don't go anywhere

01:14:20.120 when there are emergencies.

01:14:22.020 That was the history of the Patriot Act.

01:14:23.740 The Patriot Act was this radical extremist un-American law that we needed supposedly

01:14:28.140 in the wake of 9-11. They assured us, oh, don't worry, it's going to be temporary.

01:14:32.500 Here we are, 2026. It's part of our woodwork and nobody ever talks about it anymore. That's how

01:14:38.020 quickly these things can get normalized. Man, it's, well, I hope you never go off the air

01:14:47.320 because I hope this isn't our last conversation. Glenn Greenwald, thank you for all your time

01:14:51.540 and your wisdom.

01:14:54.180 Keep up the great work, Tucker.

01:14:55.120 Always great to see you.

01:14:56.380 Thanks, Glenn.

01:14:57.140 See ya.

The Tucker Carlson Show - March 16, 2026

Glenn Greenwald： Iran War Updates, False Flags, and Netanyahu’s Plot to Imprison Americans

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