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Propaganda for Tyrants: The Danger in Tucker Carlson’s ‘Pacifism’
Fox personality Tucker Carlson speaks at the 2017 Business Insider Ignition: Future of Media conference in New York, U.S., November 30, 2017. Photo: REUTERS/Lucas Jackson
When Tucker Carlson sat across from comedian-turned-podcaster Dave Smith last week and declared that the “dividing line” between him and Ben Shapiro was that Shapiro “feels a thrill when killing the enemy,” he wasn’t making a point about morality. He was performing one.
With his trademark half-smirk of false humility, Carlson intoned, “We do not have a right to kill people… we do not have a right to kill the innocent.” Then, as he so often does, he cast himself as a noble voice of moral conscience surrounded by bloodthirsty warmongers. “That’s the dividing line between me and Ben Shapiro,” he said.
But that line doesn’t divide pacifism from bloodlust. It divides moral clarity from moral theater.
The Convenient Conversion
Carlson’s newfound pacifism would be more convincing if it weren’t so exquisitely convenient. He wasn’t always allergic to the use of force. In the early 2000s, he defended the Iraq War, mocked anti-war protesters, and called for “resolute American leadership.”
He praised US strikes in Syria as “necessary shows of strength.” Only after those wars became unpopular — and after populism replaced conservatism — did Carlson decide that any military action involving civilian casualties was inherently immoral.
Since then, he has transformed “anti-war” sentiment into performance art. He interviews strongmen like Vladimir Putin and Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei with deference bordering on reverence. He portrays their regimes as victims of Western arrogance, scolds the United States for aiding Ukraine’s defense, mocks NATO as an “empire,” and treats every aggressor — from Hamas to the Kremlin — as a misunderstood nationalist simply protecting his homeland.
This is not pacifism. It is appeasement for tyrants, rebranded as empathy.
There’s a clear pattern to Carlson’s moral inversions. When Israel defends itself against fascist terrorist regimes, he insists that “killing civilians” can never be justified. When Russia invades a democracy, he claims the US “provoked” it. When Iran bankrolls terror proxies across the region, he shrugs and asks whether it’s “really our problem.”
He calls this “asking hard questions.” In reality, it’s moral inversion disguised as introspection. His sympathies reliably tilt toward those who wield cruelty as policy and away from the democracies that agonize over conscience even as they fight for survival.
That pattern reached its nadir when Carlson hosted white nationalist Nick Fuentes — a Hitler- and Stalin-admiring Holocaust denier whom he treated not with revulsion but with indulgent curiosity. Fuentes spewed bile about “Zionist media control.” Carlson nodded, called him “talented,” and moved on. In that same interview, Carlson calmly declared that he “hates Christian Zionists more than anyone.” When public outrage followed, he feigned contrition, claiming he’d merely been “mad.” It was the same pattern as always: provoke, deny, and reframe the provocation as misunderstood virtue.
Ben Shapiro and the Real Moral Divide
Carlson’s supposed “dividing line” with Shapiro reveals the delusion he’s selling. Shapiro’s worldview — rooted in Jewish ethics, classical liberalism, and just-war theory — recognizes the tragic necessity of force in confronting evil. The question is not whether killing may ever occur, but whether moral societies can survive without defending themselves.
Carlson now confuses moral restraint with moral paralysis. He accuses others of bloodlust because he has lost the vocabulary to distinguish between aggression and defense. He sees all war as equally corrupt, while Shapiro understands that refusing to confront evil ensures its victory.
Carlson’s selective pacifism collapses under the weight of reality — especially in the war Hamas started and sustained by cynical design. Hamas doesn’t merely fight Israel; it fights the very concept of moral civilization. It builds command centers beneath hospitals and schools, fires rockets from residential towers, and blocks civilians from reaching Israeli-designated humanitarian corridors.
Its 700 kilometers of tunnels, which could have sheltered ordinary Gazans, were reserved for its terrorists — not its children.
When ordinary Gazans protest, Hamas executes them. In October 2025 alone, it murdered hundreds accused — without trial — of “collaboration.”
This is not a movement that protects innocents. It is a fascist regime that feeds on civilian death. Every corpse is a press release. Every tragedy, a weapon. Hamas’s strategy is not merely to harm Israel — but to corrupt the world’s conscience by making morality itself seem impossible.
Israel, by contrast, spends billions on pure defense: Iron Dome interceptors, bomb shelters, warning systems, and evacuation zones — designed to protect civilians, both Israeli and Palestinian. Its moral imperative is the same as every democracy’s: to safeguard life even amid war. That effort often fails — not from malice, but from the impossible calculus of fighting an enemy that hides behind its own people.
Carlson’s moral arithmetic ignores that calculus entirely. If, as he claims, “no innocent death” is ever acceptable, then every democracy facing fascist regimes like Hamas is doomed. For if one side obeys the laws of war while the other hides behind them, only barbarism will prevail.
The Anti-War Pose as Anti-Moralism
Carlson’s evolution — from conventional conservative commentator to sanctimonious defender of authoritarians — mirrors a deeper sickness that is growing the West: the belief that moral complexity is hypocrisy, that self-defense is indistinguishable from aggression, and that survival itself is suspect.
It’s the same mindset that brands Israel an “occupier” for refusing to surrender its ability to defend itself, calls NATO “imperial,” and derides Churchill as a “warmonger.” At its core, this is not compassion, but cowardice marketed as virtue.
Carlson’s moral theater now serves those who thrive on Western self-doubt. Russian state television airs his commentaries. Iranian media echoes his talking points. Hamas officials cite his words when denouncing Israel.
He plays the role once filled by the isolationists of the 1930s — the celebrity preachers, pilot, and industrialists who mocked Churchill as a warmonger and thought peace could be purchased with silence. Those voices, too, claimed to be true moral realists. History judged them otherwise.
The Real Dividing Line
Carlson says the dividing line between himself, and Ben Shapiro is the “thrill of killing.” The real line is between moral seriousness and moral vanity — between those who know that defending life and free societies sometimes requires force and those who posture as saints while others bear the cost of courage.
Under very limited circumstances, pacifism can be noble. But Carlson’s brand of pacifism isn’t noble — it’s narcissistic: the comforting illusion that moral purity can be preserved by staying on the sidelines.
Slavery didn’t end through persuasion. Nazism wasn’t defeated by restraint. Evil stops only when it’s resisted — sometimes by force, always by moral clarity.
Carlson wants his audience to mistake cowardice for compassion and indulgence for conscience. If that illusion continues to spread, he won’t just distort history — he’ll help repeat its darkest chapters.
Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, antisemitism, and Jewish history and serves on the board of Herut North America.
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New Year, Same Terrorism: Palestinian Authority’s Ruling Party Keeps Promoting Violence
A group of Palestinian children being taught that Israel will be destroyed. Photo: Palestinian Media Watch.
Fatah, the ruling party of the Palestinian Authority (PA), continues to promote terrorism as legitimate, necessary, and inevitable. This comes more than three decades after Yasser Arafat was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for claiming that the PA and PLO (also ruled by Fatah) had given up terror.
Fatah’s terror wing recently used the anniversary of Fatah’s founding — January 1, 1965 — to amplify its ongoing glorification of its Martyrs and “prisoners,” i.e., terrorists, and to promote “armed struggle” as the “foremost” form of “resistance,” which is the “shortest and only way to deter” Israel “and expel it from our land”:
On the occasion of the 61st anniversary of the Intilaqa of the Palestinian revolution and the Fatah Movement … we renew the covenant with the Martyrs, the prisoners, and the wounded [i.e., terrorists] — our compass will continue to point towards Jerusalem, and our rifles will be directed at the occupation [i.e., Israel] … We in the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades emphasize the following permanent principles … Resistance in all its forms, foremost among them the armed struggle, is the shortest and only way to deter this oppressive enemy and expel it from our land. [emphasis added]
[Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, Telegram channel, Dec. 31, 2025]
The Intilaqa, or “the Launch,” of Fatah refers to its first terror attack against Israel, when it attempted to blow up the National Water Carrier.
When Fatah says that the “only way” to “deter” Israel is through “resistance in all its forms” as well as when it uses terms such as “all means” and “armed struggle,” it consistently refers to shootings, stabbings, car-rammings, Molotov cocktail attacks, and other acts of terror against Israeli civilians.
In recent months, similar statements have been made by various senior members of the PLO, the parent body that established the Palestinian Authority.
PLO Executive Committee member Azzam Al-Ahmad stated that he supports “armed struggle” to serve the Palestinian “political cause”:
PLO Executive Committee member Azzam Al-Ahmad:“The Palestinian cause is a political cause and not a military one. However, politics is not disconnected from military activity and is particularly not disconnected from the struggle activity … an armed struggle of a people fighting to regain its land and its rights.”
[Official PA TV, Topic of the Day, Nov. 11, 2025]
Hamada Farana, who is a member of the Palestinian National Council, which is the PLO’s legislative body, promoted “armed struggle” and “popular intifada” as means and tools.
Palestinian National Council member and political commentator Hamada Farana:“[We need] an agreement on the methods of the struggle. We must see the armed struggle, popular intifada, and negotiations as means and tools — not as principles. Therefore, when a shared political platform is formulated [between Fatah and Hamas] and there will be a unified representative institution, then necessarily they will reach the [appropriate] means. If armed struggle will be required, they will conduct armed struggle. If a popular intifada will be required, they will hold a popular intifada. If negotiations will be required, they will conduct negotiations.”
[Official PA TV, Capital of Capitals, Nov. 27, 2025]
Tamer Aziz, who is a political bureau member of the Palestinian Popular Struggle Front, a faction within the PLO, was proud to “renew the oath” to armed struggle and recalled the Intilaqa as well:
Palestinian Popular Struggle Front (PPSF) political bureau member Tamer Aziz: “We stand with admiration and respect in memory of the late leader, the symbol, the Martyr Yasser Arafat to renew the alliance and the oath with him, with the Launch [of Fatah], with the first bullet, the first Martyr, the first proclamation of the Launch of Fatah-Al-Asifah.”
[Official PA TV, Nov. 11, 2025]
These statements reveal an unbroken pattern that has never changed. Across its factions and institutions, the PA continues to openly promote terrorism as a usable and repeatable tool, to glorify terrorists as role models, and to reaffirm it as a core strategy.
Ephraim D. Tepler is a researcher at Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), where a version of this article first appeared.
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The History of the Jews of South Florida: Antisemitism, Resilience, and Hope (PART ONE)
The University of Florida campus. Photo: Wiki Commons.
The Jewish population of South Florida is about 650,000. It has the third largest concentration of Jews in the country and the single largest concentration of Jews (13 percent of the total population of South Florida) outside of Israel.
The story of Florida is a surprising one, with visions becoming dreams, and antisemitism in places we would not have expected.
Here is the history of one of the most popular Jewish vacation spots, which is home to growing, vibrant communities in Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties.
Florida’s Early History
In 1513, Juan Ponce de León discovered Florida for Spain, making it the first American territory to be discovered and settled. Under the Spanish Inquisition, only Catholics could live in Florida, although it is believed that Jewish Conversos were among the early settlers and soldiers of St. Augustine.
Under the Treaty of Paris in 1763, England acquired Florida from Spain, and Jews were permitted to reside there. The first-recorded Jews to settle in Florida, Alexander Solomons, Joseph D. Pallaccios, and Samuel Israel, arrived in Pensacola.
More Jews moved to northern Florida over the next few decades, though the Jewish population still comprised only a dozen individuals.
In 1783, England returned Florida to Spain. Once again under the rule of the Inquisition, Spain ordered a census that revealed Jews, including a Polish Jew, David Moses, who had a hide store in St. Augustine. Remarkably, Spain decided to allow the few Jews to remain, as the area needed settlers.
Florida became an American territory in 1821, and between 30 and 40 Jews lived in the northern part of the state.
Samuel Myers, a lawyer, settled in Pensacola in 1821. In 1822, his wife, Louisa, gave birth to Virginia Myers, the first documented Jewish child born in Florida.
A Vision for Florida: Moses Elias Levy
Moses Elias Levy was born in Morocco in 1782 to an influential Jewish merchant who served in the sultan’s court. Levy was fluent in five languages and was a man of many talents. He was a successful merchant, a social activist, an abolitionist, and a supporter of universal education.
In 1818, Levy began work on an ambitious project. His vision was to create a Jewish settlement that would give oppressed Jews from Europe an agrarian community where they could freely practice their religion and preserve their culture.
He purchased over 50,000 acres in Alachua County, Northern Florida, in 1820, which eventually grew to 100,000 acres. He constructed three properties: A sugar cane plantation on the Matanzas River, the Hope Hill plantation in present-day Astor, and Pilgrimage, a few miles from Micanopy. Levy’s dream started to come to fruition in 1823 when his business partner, Frederick Warburg, arrived with 21 settlers.
Historical roadside marker, Micanopy, Fl. (Photo by Jrryjude – Own work, Wiki Commons)
However, the community lasted only 13 years before the Second Seminole War broke out in 1835. At that point, the community dispersed.
Although it was a financial failure for Levy, it was successful in that it was the first Jewish farming settlement in the United States and created possibilities for persecuted Jews from Europe. The Jewish colony he built in Micanopy is today home to the University of Florida. In an interesting turn of history, this University has the largest Jewish population of any public university in the United States.
Florida Becomes a State
On March 3, 1845, Florida became the 27th state of the United States. Out of a population of 66,500, there were fewer than one hundred Jews living there.
Yet their numbers did not diminish their influence. Moses Levy’s son, David Levy Yulee, served as the first US Senator from Florida, making him the first Jew to serve in the US Senate. He is known as the Architect of Florida Statehood, having helped write the state’s Constitution and organizing the first cross-state railroad in 1853.
Even his very name remains associated with the state. Levy County, on the Gulf Coast in Northwest Florida, and the town of Yulee in Nassau County, are both named in David Levy Yulee’s honor.
David Levy Yulee
In the second half of the 19th century, Florida’s Jewish population continued to slowly grow, and Jacksonville was at the center of that growth. It was there that a Jewish cemetery, the first Jewish institution in Florida, was established in 1857, and the first synagogue was formed in 1876. By 1900, six congregations had been established in Northern Florida.
A 1591 map of Florida by Jacques le Moyne de Morgues.
The Barrier to Jewish Migration from Northern to Southern Florida: Antisemitism
South Florida’s Jewish community lagged behind the Northern and Central Florida Jewish communities for decades. In 1928, roughly 40 percent of the Jewish population of 10,000 lived in Jacksonville. Yet in the second half of the 20th century, Jews moved south, building communities in Miami and Miami Beach, and then spread to Broward and Palm Beach Counties.
The primary reason for the small Jewish population in South Florida was the very visible antisemitism.
It was common to see signs in Miami and Miami Beach that read “Gentiles Only” or “No Jews or Dogs.” Wealthy and influential developers, including highway builder and entrepreneur Carl G. Fisher, refused to serve Jewish customers, and oil and railroad mogul Henry Flagler (1830-1913) prohibited land sales and hotel lodgings to Jewish clients.
By the 1930s, advertisements for some of Miami Beach’s oceanfront hotels said, “Always a view, never a Jew.”
In Miami Beach, Jews were only permitted to live south of Fifth Street, as developers placed restrictive covenants in their land deeds prohibiting the sale of Miami Beach lots to Jews north of Fifth Street. Resourceful Jews made purchases of modest hotels and apartments on property south of Fifth Street, but the overall feeling was one of antisemitism.
The discriminatory laws began easing up in the 1930s and officially ended in 1949.
Miami’s Jewish Foundation
The first Jew to arrive in Miami was Samuel Singer, who migrated from northern Palm Beach in 1895.
By 1896, Jews owned 12 of the 16 businesses in the pioneer town of Miami, and the Jews held religious services in Miami that year. Yet, when the city was damaged by fire and struck with a yellow fever epidemic, the community fell apart. By 1903, the Jewish population had declined to a single person: Isidor Cohen.
In 1904, Isidor Cohen married Ida Schneidman, and when they had a son in 1907, the first documented bris was celebrated in Miami. In 1913, the death of a Jewish tourist forced the still tiny Jewish community of 35 to create the first congregation and a cemetery.
Advertising, combined with abundant land, new roads, automobiles, and commercial aviation, created a tourist and real estate boom in Miami in the 1920s. The population of 100 Jewish families grew to 3,500 during this period of prosperity. Yet, due to the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926, the stock market crash, and the failure of five local banks, the city’s population decreased significantly again.
In the mid-1930s, Jewish Miami began a steady recovery. The hotel, banking, and construction industries flourished thanks to Jewish contributions. The post-war economic boom brought additional tourists and settlers to Miami, many of whom were Jews. By 1950, there were 55,000 Jews in Miami, and in the coming decade, almost ten thousand Jews arrived yearly.
In 1952, Abe Aronovitz became Miami’s first (and, to date, the only) Jewish mayor. In 1963, the first two Jews from South Florida were elected to the state legislature, and in 1973, William Lehman (1913-2005) was elected to the United States House of Representatives for the first of 10 terms. In this period, large groups of Jews began moving to North Miami and North Miami Beach.
Initially, Jews were economically based in tourism, building industries, or real estate. Eventually, many began moving into medical, legal, and financial professions, and these trends continue to this day.
Three Jewish men, Miami, 1898. Isidore Cohen (center) is believed to be the first permanent Jewish resident of Miami. State Archives of Florida.
Rabbi Menachem Levine is the CEO of JDBY-YTT, the largest Jewish school in the Midwest. He served as Rabbi of Congregation Am Echad in San Jose, CA, from 2007 to 2020. He is a popular speaker and writes for numerous publications on Torah, Jewish History, and Contemporary Jewish Topics. Rabbi Levine’s personal website is https://thinktorah.org
A version of this article was originally published at Aish.
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In Trump’s ‘Donroe Doctrine,’ echoes of Nazi justifications for aggression
When Adolf Hitler was justifying German aggression, he invoked Lebensraum — the claim that a superior nation had the right to expand into neighboring territories to secure the resources it needed. For Donald Trump, whose “Donroe Doctrine” seems to have much in common with the idea of Lebensraum, the prizes are Venezuelan crude, Greenland’s mineral wealth, and uncontested hegemony in the Western Hemisphere.
During the first year of Trump’s second term, the 47th president of the United States attempted his own version of what Germans call Gleichschaltung — the Nazis’ forced alignment of institutions and society with Hitler’s will. Trump moved to bend the federal bureaucracy, the intelligence services, the military chain of command, and the civil service into a single, obedient apparatus.
But unlike Hitler in 1933, Trump has run into real limits at home: courts that won’t bend, Democratic-led states that won’t yield, a resistance that keeps gathering strength, weak polling, and a MAGA movement that’s beginning to splinter. And so, he has shifted his gaze to the outside world — a pivot laid bare in Stephen Miller’s volcanic interview with Jake Tapper on CNN and in Trump’s own Oval Office conversation with New York Times reporters.
Sounding a bit like Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s right-hand man, Trump’s deputy chief of staff told Tapper, “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”
Two days after Miller’s bellicose comments, Trump echoed the same worldview in his interview with The Times: international law is whatever the United States — meaning he — decides it is.
“I don’t need international law,” he said. “I’m not looking to hurt people.”
Regarding his push for Greenland to become part of the U.S., Trump stated, “Ownership is very important. Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success.’’
There are echoes here of Hitler, who wrote in Mein Kampf that “the stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker.” In multiple speeches, Hitler made clear that the state’s own interests were supreme and that international law could be brushed aside.
Trump’s foreign policy for the Western Hemisphere comes right out of the authoritarian’s playbook for domination — threats of invasion, extortion, and exploitation of a country’s weaknesses to force that country to bend to the bullying country’s will.
When it comes to Venezuela, Trump, Miller, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are counting on Delcy Rodríguez, interim leader after Trump’s kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro, to cooperate with the Trump administration in reviving Venezuela’s oil industry — with oil-sales money going not just to America, but supposedly also to the Venezuelan people.
Trump said that Venezuela “will be turning over” between 30 and 50 million barrels of sanctioned oil to the U.S. “This Oil will be sold at its Market Price, and that money will be controlled by me, as President of the United States of America, to ensure it is used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States!” he declared in a Jan. 6 social media post.
“That money,” Rubio told reporters, “will then be handled in such a way that we will control how it is disbursed in a way that benefits the Venezuelan people, not corruption, not the regime, so we have a lot of leverage to move on the stabilization front.”
The American president has not hidden the fact that his motive all along has been to get control of Venezuela’s oil reserves. Only recently, and mostly as an afterthought, has Trump talked about eventually allowing new elections in Venezuela.
In Trump’s mind, at least, he is now dictator of Venezuela.
The Trump–Rubio game plan for Venezuela, as developed so far, hinges on U.S. control of Venezuelan oil as the lever for everything else: a Washington-run “stabilization” period in which the United States sells Venezuela’s crude, controls the revenue, and dictates the terms of economic reopening; a caretaker role for Delcy Rodríguez and the remaining bureaucracy to keep order and carry out U.S. directives; and, somewhere down the line, a vague promise of elections once the country has been reshaped to Washington’s liking.
But how realistic is this plan?
History offers plenty of warnings about how often great-power fantasies collide with the realities of occupation.
When Nazi Germany invaded Norway in 1940, one of its aims was to control Scandinavian resources — including Swedish iron ore and Norwegian shipping routes. Norwegian fascist Vidkun Quisling proclaimed himself head of the government, becoming a puppet of Berlin.
But Quisling never delivered the stability Berlin expected. His government was despised, resistance spread, and the occupation became far more volatile and costly than the Germans had planned. After the war, those who had collaborated with the Nazis paid dearly. Thousands of Norwegians were convicted and 25 — including Vidkun Quisling — were executed.
Venezuela is not Norway. But the assumption that a hand-picked local leader will quietly manage a country whose sovereignty has just been shattered is a dangerous one. Venezuela is thick with armed actors who may see cooperation with Washington as betrayal — heavily armed pro-government paramilitary groups called the colectivos, splintering factions of the military, and a constellation of irregular forces operating along the borders.
For the moment, Trump insists no American boots will be needed on the ground. But that could change quickly, especially if U.S. companies establish a significant presence at Venezuelan oil facilities and an insurgency threatens to topple what many Venezuelans may view as a collaborationist regime in Caracas.
In his interview with The New York Times, Trump said it could take years before Venezuela becomes the stable, petroleum powerhouse he envisions. Which means that U.S. control of Venezuela — however the White House chooses to describe it — will pass to whoever succeeds him as president.
Whatever the outcome of Trump’s Venezuela power grab, the troubles it will unlease may well persist far into the future. And if Trump continues to rattle sabers over Greenland, the consequences could be even direr, raising the specter of Denmark’s NATO allies mobilizing to defend the island against the ambitions of an American president.
The post In Trump’s ‘Donroe Doctrine,’ echoes of Nazi justifications for aggression appeared first on The Forward.