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Tucker Carlson hosts Nick Fuentes for a friendly conversation about ‘these Zionist Jews’
Tucker Carlson wanted to know: What does Nick Fuentes actually believe?
“Everybody’s going to be like, ‘You’re a Nazi, you just like Fuentes,’” the former Fox News personality mused on his show Tuesday. “But then I’m like, ‘I don’t think Fuentes is going away. Ben Shapiro tried to strangle him in the crib in college, and now he’s bigger than ever.’”
So Carlson invited the avowed antisemite and white nationalist livestreamer onto his online talk show. There, the two had a friendly conversation about the Jews, and whether it was right to blame them for everything.
And Fuentes, whose own platform has only grown in the wake of the assassination of conservative archrival Charlie Kirk, made clear what he believes. Asked who in the conservative movement needed to be taken down, he responded, “These Zionist Jews.”
The sit-down, which had been rumored for weeks, carries implications for the growing popularity of antisemitism and anti-Israel voices on the right. Both men have followings in the millions, and Carlson has maintained close ties in President Donald Trump’s orbit even as he has become a vociferous critic of Israel and helped platform Holocaust revisionists.
Fuentes, meanwhile, has launched a far-right attack on mainstream conservatives using antisemitism as his chief plank — an ideology that an increasing number of young conservative operatives are also embracing. On YouTube, the top comments under the two-hour episode were rife with antisemitic memes.
Even as he signalled broad alignment with Fuentes’s views on Israel, Carlson gently sought to distinguish himself from his guest’s more overt antisemitism.
“I’m not that interested in ‘the Jews,’ but I am very interested in the foreign policy question,” Carlson said at one point, bringing up his fingers for air quotes. Later, he told Fuentes, “The second you’re like, ‘Well, actually, it’s the Jews,’ first of all, it’s against my Christian faith. Like, I just don’t believe that and I never will. Period. And second, then it becomes a way to discredit. That’s when I was like, ‘This guy’s a fed.’”
In response, the young man who opens his “America First” online shows with animated depictions of Jewish conspiracies outlined his own core belief: that “neoconservatism,” an ideology he opposes, is Jewish in nature because it prioritizes allegiance to Israel over traditional conservative principles.
“As far as the Jews are concerned, you cannot actually divorce Israel and the neocons and all those things that you talk about from Jewishness: ethnicity, religion, identity,” Fuentes told Carlson. While some Jews do oppose Israel, he acknowledged, among his enemies in conservatism, “I see Jewishness as the common denominator.”
Fuentes continued, “They’re a stateless people. They’re unassimilable. They resist assimilation for thousands of years. And I think that’s a good thing. And now they have this territory in Israel. There’s a deep religious affection for the state. It’s bound up in their identity.” Modern neoconservatism, he said, stemmed from “Jewish leftists who were mugged by reality when they saw the surprise attack in the Yom Kippur War.”
Fuentes insisted he doesn’t hate all Jews: “Not to be that guy and say that thing, but my best friend is a Jewish person,” he said, also claiming his “assistant” is Jewish (it was unclear if he was referring to the same person). He then went on to blend his understanding of Jewish American anxieties, some of which have been articulated by leading Jewish communal figures, with the dual-loyalty trope.
“If you are a Jewish person in America, it’s sort of rational self-interest, politically, to say, ‘I am a minority. I am a religious, ethnic minority. This is not really my home. My ancestral home is in Israel,’” Fuentes said. “They have this international community across borders, extremely organized, that is putting the interests of themselves before the interests of their home country.”
Even beyond Israel, Fuentes also sought to paint Judaism as incompatible with the European tradition to which America’s modern right aspires. “They hate the Romans because the Romans destroyed the Temple,” he said. “We don’t think that, as Americans and white people.”
To hear Fuentes tell it, his radicalization was a story of first being taken in by, before later rebelling against, influential Jewish conservatives. Israel was his breaking point, he insisted.
Ben Shapiro, Mark Levin and Dennis Prager were his right-wing heroes in high school, Fuentes said; he would parrot Shapiro talking points in debates and was a member of a Facebook group for young fans of PragerU. As a college freshman in 2017 he fell into the orbit of The Daily Wire, Shapiro’s media company, after a debate against his school’s progressive student body president went viral. Fuentes would soon drop out of college to pursue conservative media full-time.
Quickly, Fuentes claimed, he became suspicious of Shapiro’s pro-Israel views. When a staffer asked him if he had any interest in traveling to Israel, he responded, “No, I think I have everything I need right here in America…. And that was a little bit of foreshadowing.”
Later, he said, he would challenge Daily Wire staff: “I would say, ‘So, why do we give Israel all this money?’” he recalled. “They would say, ‘You’re asking it in an antisemitic way.’”
But Fuentes, in his recollection, “was genuinely inquisitive. I wanted to know. Is there an actual reason?… There’s a lot of these neocon Jewish types behind the Iraq War.” The Daily Wire’s rejection of his questions on Israel, he said, spurred his shunning across the broader mainstream conservative movement and led to him going independent with his preaching of more insidious forms of Jewish control.
Comparing himself to Shapiro, Fuentes reflected, “I didn’t come from some strange background. I come from a normal home. My parents are Catholic.” (In recent weeks, Shapiro and some other voices on the right have warned of a rise in antisemitic conspiracies among their ranks.)
Even as Fuentes became a Trump loyalist in the run-up to the 2016 election, he said, he broke with conservatives by supporting President Barack Obama’s decision to abstain from, rather than back, a National Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
“Fox News and all the pro-Israel conservatives are calling him an antisemite. They’re saying, ‘He hates Jews! He’s an antisemite! He hates Israel!’” Fuentes recalled. “It seemed hypocritical. It seemed like how, when conservatives would critique anything about race, we got called racist. Or anything about feminism, we got called sexist. All Obama did was uphold US policy on the West Bank that we’ve had since ’67, which is, we don’t support the settlements. I said, how is it antisemitic to just be consistent on our U.S. foreign policy?”
On Israel, Carlson said, they agreed.
“I always thought it’s great to criticize and question our relationship with Israel because it’s insane and it hurts us,” Carlson told him. “We get nothing out of it. I completely agree with you there.” He also blasted Christian Zionists on the right he used to support, including U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, whom he said have been “seized by this brain virus.”
Later discussing the war in Gaza, Carlson added, “One of the reasons I’m mad about Gaza is because the Israeli position is, everyone who lives in Gaza is a terrorist because of how they were born, including the women and the children. That’s not a Western view. That’s an Eastern view. That’s non-Christian. That’s totally incompatible with Christianity and Western civilization. They say, ‘Oh, we’re the defenders of Western civilization.’ Not with that attitude, you’re not.”
The two did agree on some Jews they both respect, including Glenn Greenwald, an iconoclastic Israel critic formerly on the left who himself hosted Fuentes recently on his own podcast, and Paul the Apostle.
Elsewhere, the men discussed whom Fuentes wants to see be president next (he picked Ye, the superstar rapper who has embraced Nazism) and his 2022 dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Ye and Trump, where Fuentes said the once and future president said, “This guy’s hardcore. I like this guy.” (Trump has since claimed he didn’t know who Fuentes was when they dined together.)
When asked to share his unfettered core beliefs with Carlson, Fuentes obliged, painting a vision of a future America that Jews did not have the right to inherit.
“We do need to be right-wing. We do need to be Christian. We do, on some level, need to be pro-white,” he said. “Not to the exclusion of everybody else, but recognizing that white people have a special heritage here, as Americans.”
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The post Tucker Carlson hosts Nick Fuentes for a friendly conversation about ‘these Zionist Jews’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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‘Mensch of Manhattan’ Lasher wins over Bores in fight for Nadler’s seat, media projects
(New York Jewish Week) — Micah Lasher has defeated Alex Bores in the battle for retiring Rep. Jerry Nadler’s Manhattan congressional seat, according to media projections Tuesday night.
In the race for the 12th Congressional District, the most Jewish in the country, Lasher had 40,106 votes, or 39.1 percent, and Bores collected 35,822 votes, or 35 percent, with 87 percent of the ballots counted.
The crowded field in the Democratic primary also included John F. Kennedy grandson Jack Kennedy Shlossberg, public health expert Nina Schwalbe, and George Conway, a Republican-turned-Democrat and Trump antagonist. All three were trailing well behind Lasher.
During his victory speech, Lasher pointed to both his and the district’s Jewish identity.
“It is an enormous point of pride that I will be representing the most Jewish congressional district in the country,” Lasher said. “I will always stand up for our community with pride.”
He also received a loud ovation after he thanked “the rabbis and Jewish community leaders” who helped the campaign.
A number of Lasher’s political allies and former bosses spoke, including Nadler, who’s represented the upper West Side since 1992, Gov. Kathy Hochul, Comptroller Mark Levine, and Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal, who told the JTA that Lasher would be a bridge between Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the Jewish community.
Holyman-Sigal called Lasher the “mensch of Manhattan.”
Lasher thanked Nadler for his decades of service and mentorship, saying he taught Lasher things like “vision, compassion, and how to canvass voters outside Zabar’s.”
Nadler is “as much an institution in Manhattan as Central Park and pastrami on rye,” Lasher said.
The House seat — which covers the Upper West and Upper East sides and midtown Manhattan, and is seen as a crown jewel in New York politics — opened up after Nadler announced last fall that he would retire at the end of this term.
Nadler’s preferred heir was Lasher, a Jewish State Assembly member who has worked for the progressive stalwart and other prominent politicians such as Gov. Kathy Hochul and former Mayor Mike Bloomberg. Lasher has the support of those former bosses, plus much of the West Side political establishment.
Fellow Assembly member Bores, meanwhile, has built a coalition that includes both pro-Israel moderates and progressive groups critical of the Jewish state by emphasizing that he will be tough on artificial intelligence companies. Former congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, who represented much of Manhattan’s East Side from 1993 until 2023, is among Bores’ supporters.
On the subject of Israel, the makeup of the NY-12 race has been unlike other contested New York City races: Elsewhere, at least one of the two leading candidates has accmused Israel of committing a genocide in Gaza and supports placing conditions on U.S. military aid to Israel.
But Lasher and Bores both describe themselves as pro-Israel and anti-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, and neither one supports blocking weapons sales to the Jewish state.
Mamdani is himself a voter in the district as a resident of Gracie Mansion and who cast his ballot a few days ago, during the early voting period, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He has declined to weigh in publicly on the race. The mayor endorsed two democratic socialist candidates and Brad Lander — his Jewish ally who accuses Israel of genocide, and has positioned himself against both offensive and defensive military aid to Israel — in other races.
Lasher and Bores have both consistently advocated for universally applying the existing Leahy Law, which bars the U.S. from providing military assistance to foreign military units that violate human rights with impunity.
Schlossberg has criticized Lasher and Bores for their stance, calling it an “insufficient answer,” and advocates for blocking offensive weapons sales to Israel while still funding the Iron Dome defensive missile system. He is the only of the top-four candidates to call for conditions on aid to Israel and halting any weapons sales. After initially leading in early polls, Schlossberg’s support appears to have fallen amid questions over his lack of experience.
Conway, an anti-Trumper and longtime attorney who was married to former Donald Trump staffer Kellyanne Conway, rounds out the top four in the polling.
Throughout the election, candidates convened for forums at numerous synagogues in the heavily Jewish district — 23.3% of constituents are Jewish, according to a 2024 study — and answered questions related to antisemitism, Israel and other Jewish-related issues.
Lasher has said at multiple forums that he doesn’t see anti-Zionism as being precisely the same thing as antisemitism, but that “often when you see one you see the other.”
He and Bores have both touted their support for a statewide “buffer zone” bill — which Lasher introduced in response to pro-Palestinian demonstrations outside synagogues — that would curb protests outside houses of worship. Meanwhile, Schlossberg has pointed out at Jewish forums that the first policy his campaign released was “Jack’s Fast-Track Plan,” which would fast-track a doubling of funds for the Nonprofit Security Grant Program that funds security at houses of worship and community centers.
During a June forum at Upper West Side synagogue B’nai Jeshurun, Lasher said he felt “exhausted” by how much the political dialogue — both in the NY-12 race and more broadly — is “obsessed” with Israel.
Lasher is sure to win in November’s general election in the heavily Democratic district where he will face only token Republican opposition.
The post ‘Mensch of Manhattan’ Lasher wins over Bores in fight for Nadler’s seat, media projects appeared first on The Forward.
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I helped sell Obama’s Iran deal. Its critics owe us all an explanation.
(JTA) — Neoconservatives have some ‘splainin’ to do, as Lucy’s television husband, Ricky Ricardo used to say.
The war on Iran has turned out to be a debacle of historic proportions.
After months of military escalation, tens of billions of dollars expended, critical weapons stockpiles depleted, and a region once again thrown into crisis, the United States now finds itself humiliated. The memorandum of understanding reportedly concluded last week does not represent the culmination of victory. It represents the codification of failure.
Many understood that nuclear disarmament and regime change in Iran could not be achieved through force. As I wrote in these pages a few months ago, more than a decade ago, we reached a solution designed to avert precisely the calamity that has unfolded. It was the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or, in layman’s parlance, the Iran nuclear deal.
As a certified denizen of the Swamp — I served in the Clinton White House’s communications shop and later founded a Washington, DC strategic communications firm — I was at the forefront of selling the Obama administration’s agreement to the American public.
I remember those days well — and I do not miss them.
JCPOA defenders, particularly those of us in the Jewish community, were attacked in the ugliest terms imaginable. We were called appeasers, sellouts, self-hating Jews and worse. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu traveled to Washington and outrageously warned Congress that the deal might pave the way to a second Holocaust.
JCPOA advocates never argued that the agreement signed in Vienna was perfect.
Its critics pointed to the sunset provisions. They objected that the deal did not address every malign activity undertaken by the Islamic Republic throughout the Middle East. These were legitimate concerns. Politics, however, is the art of the possible; geopolitics doubly so.
That agreement nevertheless achieved something extraordinary. Iran shipped out the overwhelming majority of its enriched uranium. International inspectors gained unprecedented access. A mechanism existed to monitor and constrain Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. The prospect of military confrontation receded.
The regime’s hardliners hated the agreement. The Revolutionary Guard fought it tooth and nail. Integration into the global economy threatened entrenched interests within the Islamic Republic. A growing middle class and increasing international engagement carried risks for those whose power depended on its isolation and perpetual confrontation.
Unfortunately, hardliners were not confined to Tehran.
The maximal-pressure advocates in Washington ultimately prevailed. During the first Trump administration, the United States withdrew from the agreement. Tore it up, as the president bragged. Despite the best efforts of our European partners, who had also signed the accord, the framework collapsed beneath the weight of renewed sanctions and diplomatic abandonment.
What followed, we were promised, was supposed to vindicate the critics.
Instead, it vindicated the critics’ critics.
The maximal-pressure advocates have spent years moving the goalposts. First, we were told, sanctions would bring the regime to its knees. They did not. Then economic isolation would force Tehran to abandon its nuclear ambitions. It did not. Then military pressure would succeed where sanctions had failed. It did not. Then leadership decapitation, covert action, and military escalation would produce regime change. They did not.
Each promised but failed breakthrough gave way to another promised breakthrough.
And now comes the final indignity: the so-called memorandum of understanding.
After years of threats, sanctions, covert action, military escalation and open warfare, the United States has agreed to resume negotiations with the very regime it set out to break. The Islamic Republic remains in power. Its leadership and political system remain intact.
Nor is that all.
The agreement reportedly provides waivers for Iranian oil exports and opens the door to sanctions relief and renewed access to many billions in frozen assets. It establishes yet another negotiating process on the nuclear question rather than resolving it. It leaves unresolved many of the issues that maximal-pressure advocates once described as non-negotiable, including Iran’s missile capabilities, its regional proxy network, or the many canisters of near-bomb-grade enriched uranium — what the president calls nuclear dust.
Even the future status of the Strait of Hormuz, the critical passage for oil open before the war, and now established as a lever for Iran to exert pressure, appears destined for further negotiation rather than decisive resolution.
The advocates of maximal pressure promised a better deal than the JCPOA. They promised that Iran would be forced to make concessions unavailable through diplomacy.
Instead, after years of confrontation, Washington finds itself lifting pressure, restoring economic benefits, negotiating with a surviving regime and postponing the most difficult questions to future talks.
Hell, in Paris last week, Trump actually made the case for Iran to retain, build or buy missiles and maintain at least some nuclear power.
So, what, precisely, was achieved?
The tragedy is not merely that the war failed to accomplish its objectives. It is that we already possessed a framework that constrained Iran’s nuclear program without requiring military confrontation. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was imperfect, to be sure. Its supporters never claimed otherwise. But it reduced risk, established verification mechanisms and avoided precisely the cycle of escalation that has consumed the past decade.
Its opponents insisted there was a better way.
History has now rendered its verdict.
The United States ultimately abandoned a functioning diplomatic framework in pursuit of fantasies that proved unattainable. Having exhausted sanctions, threats and military force, it has arrived back at the negotiating table poorer, weaker and in possession of less leverage than before.
I’m afraid I told you so.
The defenders of the JCPOA were mocked as appeasers. Yet the memorandum of understanding now before us amounts to an admission of the very proposition we advanced all along: However distasteful it may be, the Islamic Republic is not a problem that can be bombed or sanctioned out of existence.
Diplomacy could have spared us the war.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post I helped sell Obama’s Iran deal. Its critics owe us all an explanation. appeared first on The Forward.
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Lander unseats Goldman on winning congressional election night for Mamdani
Former City Comptroller Brad Lander handily defeated incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman in the New York Democratic primary Tuesday night, while lesser-known Assemblymember Claire Valdez secured the nomination for another House seat — both after campaigning as sharp critics of Israel and with the endorsement of Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Preliminary results showed Lander with about 66% of the vote to Goldman’s 34%. Valdez won with 56% of the vote for the open seat being vacated by Rep. Nydia Velazquez. Both are virtually assured of winning the general election in November in their heavily Democratic districts.
A third candidate whom Mamdani had endorsed, former Columbia Gaza war encampment organizer Darializa Avila Chevalier, held a slight lead over Rep. Adriano Espaillat on Tuesday night.
Representing a spectrum ranging from liberal Zionist critic (Lander) to longtime activist for the Palestinian cause (Avila Chevalier), the strong results for Mamdani’s chosen candidates is being closely watched nationally in a Democratic Party where many voters say they want the U.S. to distance itself from Israel. All three candidates say they will support cutting off U.S. military aid to Israel, including for the Iron Dome defense system.
At a campaign rally last week, Mamdani compared the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to “monsters” who “move millions in dark money to accomplish a single goal — to preserve their power, so that they can turn us against one another.” The remarks drew widespread condemnation from Jewish leaders, including some Mamdani supporters.
Lander is a high-profile Jewish politician allied with Mamdani, who this election cycle threw his weight behind a slate of progressive candidates who have critiqued hardline pro-Israel money and use the terms “genocide” and “apartheid” to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank.
Setting out to challenge the incumbent, Lander zeroed in on Goldman’s support for U.S. military aid to Israel and his past ties to the campaign fundraising group AIPAC during the campaign.
Lander told the New York Times that criticizing AIPAC makes him “queasy” given “the antisemitic tropes at play,” but that he feels an obligation to call out its funding nonetheless as he promises to curtail U.S. military aid to Israel.
In NY-7, another candidate backed by Mamdani defeated the incumbent’s handpicked successor. democratic socialist Valdez won against Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, who had the endorsement of outgoing Rep. Velázquez.
But Mamdani’s brand of Israel politics didn’t succeed everywhere: In the Bronx, Rep. Ritchie Torres — one of the Democratic party’s most staunch supporters of Israel — handily defeated Michael Blake, a former state assemblyman who allied with Mamdani during the mayoral primary last year.
For state comptroller, incumbent Thomas DiNapoli — who made additional purchases of Israel bonds in the aftermath of Oct. 7 — won over Jewish challenger Drew Warshaw, who argued that the state should divest from Israel bonds because they help “finance Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s wars.”
State Assemblymember Micah Lasher won the race to succeed Rep. Jerry Nadler, who retired after 33 years in the House and served as one of Congress’ leading voices for liberal Jews. In that race, the leading candidates Lasher and Alex Bores had broad agreement in their support of Israel.
The other candidate in the race, Kennedy political scion Jack Schlossberg, had called for conditioning aid to Israel and attempted to draw contrast with Bores and Lasher on the issue. But Schlossberg’s campaign struggled to gain traction amid questions about his lack of political experience.
The post Lander unseats Goldman on winning congressional election night for Mamdani appeared first on The Forward.
