Saagar Enjeti’s Interview on The Tucker Carlson Show (Transcript)

That is not how this works.

And in particular in that document, I think it’s one of the most disgusting documents ever released by the United States government because it said there was no blackmail. We’re not releasing this information. Kash Patel has this new line about how we’re not going to re-victimize women. Ask the Epstein victims themselves. They have been begging for this information to come to light specifically to implicate the powerful men that victimized them and through which they were basically used for trafficking purposes to ensnare them in this high level US Intelligence, Israeli intelligence operation probably run in conjunction.

And that, you know, the trail of this entire thing just. It enrages me. It actually enrages me.

TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t think you’re alone. And I do think as someone who voted for the president, campaigned for the president a lot. I’m not attacking the president, but I think even people who are fully on board with the bulk of the MAGA agenda are like, this is too much.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yes, yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m saying that with love and I hope that they’re listening because I think this threatens to blow up the whole thing. But let’s just back up a little bit and just pick at some of the inconsistencies here. So you’re saying that Pam Bondi said on camera, “we have a client list.”

SAAGAR ENJETI: On the White House lawn.

TUCKER CARLSON: “I’ve seen the client list.” Yes. And then yesterday she’s saying there’s no—

SAAGAR ENJETI: There’s no client list, and there was no systematic blackmail. That actually might be the most preposterous line in the document.

The Logical Inconsistencies

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, it doesn’t make any sense. So they’ve said that there were thousands of young people, in some cases minors, underage children, victimized, sexually victimized. Are they saying that Epstein single-handedly had sex with all? Because actually, for whatever it’s worth, I don’t think anyone that I, I’ve never seen anyone make the claim that Epstein had sex with anybody.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yes, that’s right. Well, a lot of these allegations revolve around group activities and they around masseuse and being. I mean, look the way that Dershowitz and others would claim it is “I kept my underwear on.” And it was all a very above the board massage information.

There’s that famous photo of Bill Clinton in the airport terminal with one of these young victims who herself says she was a victim of the Epstein entire machine. So you’re exactly right. It’s like for these thousands of women, were they victimized entirely by Ghislaine Maxwell and by Jeffrey Epstein?

Because by the way, that’s not even what the Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein court documents and other things that we already knew that were in the public information. That’s not what they say, that’s not what the testimony of the victims of these people say.

And so again, even this client list thing, and I do think people can go down the rabbit hole too much and think that there is, you know, there’s no ledger, as in client had sex with so and so. And we, you know, because of supported Israel. That’s not how it works.

TUCKER CARLSON: So the term client list itself is misleading.

The Money Trail: The Real Story

SAAGAR ENJETI: It’s misleading because really what we want is a full list of the victims of the people who flew on the flight logs. But the most important is the money. And I think a lot of people actually miss that in the Epstein story.

Jeffrey Epstein came to power largely because he worked at Bear Stearns and effectively was a high finance money laundering expert. That’s effectively what we can learn from his background. That’s how he came involved with Leon Black. Leon Black was one of the most powerful men in New York. And this is the head of the Apollo Group. He paid him 170 million through various shell corporations for tax advice.

And when he was caught doing that, he was said actually it wasn’t even useful because all the tax advice was actually in the public domains. Leslie Wexner in 1991, I believe signed full power of attorney over to Jeffrey Epstein. He was one of the richest men in America, I think was the richest man in Ohio at that time.

Jeffrey Epstein becomes the head of the Wexner funnels some 2.5 million to Ehud Barak, the former Israeli Prime Minister. I’m putting these things out there because I want people to know that the money is an integral part of the operation.

And to the extent that the sex trafficking and all of that is linked, they are fused together because they were used primarily by the intelligence community. Both Epstein was a conduit of high stakes money laundering for things like, you know, not Iran Contra specifically, but let’s say funneling arms from Israel to Iran. This was also how he met. Eventually Robert Maxwell became ensnared with his daughter Ghislaine Maxwell, the money laundering is—

TUCKER CARLSON: Actually more key to his intelligence from Israel to Iran.

The Maxwell Connection

SAAGAR ENJETI: Well, this was a key part of the Maxwell story. Robert Maxwell is very sketchy character. Ghislaine Maxwell’s father. People focus on the tabloid. That’s actually not all what I’m interested in. What I’m interested in is the fact that he’s this Czechoslovakian Orthodox Jew who escapes from the Nazis. He eventually becomes a highly decorated soldier. You know, actually I think he won the second highest medal in the UK for his operation during World War II.

From that point forward, becomes very, very enmeshed with the Zionist community inside of the UK and propping up the newly formed state of Israel. From that point forward, he basically serves as a high stakes, almost an entity in and of itself. That’s the way that Darrell Cooper has described him is like a sovereign wealth fund almost, which together brokers all kinds of deal cutout deals, you know, between Israel and Iran.

And actually Epstein himself, when he was just 28 years old, met, you know, he flew on a private jet, I believe, to the Pentagon with somebody who we know is directly linked to these, you know, previous intelligence operations and funneling money and weapons into many of these conflicts. So this stretches back decades and that’s a very, very important part of the story.

The Systematic Blackmail Operation

So please just do not tell me that there’s no part of a systematic blackmail campaign. It’s so preposterous. And it actually just makes us want. It makes me want to tear my hair out.

And I guess the only good news is that just like with the Kennedy assassination, we do all know the truth. It’s the Kennedy assassination broke this country. I really believe that. I know you do as well. But it broke something even more fundamental and opened up what they called the credibility gap under the Johnson administration, where prior to the 1960s, Americans trusted their government.

It was actually, it was a beautiful thing. I mean, it was bad in some ways as well. We were taken advantage of by the Dulles brothers and a lot of other horrible things they were doing the 1950s. But it was beautiful in the sense of social and of civic trust. Yeah, and something was broken with that, with the Kennedy assassination. And then it was extended, of course, into the war in Vietnam. And we’ve never been the same since.

And all the Trump, you know, the Trump administration elected on the backs of a lot of these people who want more transparency in government, saw a lot of this corruption to just turn around and do the same thing. It’s just too much. It’s too much for me and I think it’s too much for a lot of other people.

The Epstein Investigation: A Deeper Look

TUCKER CARLSON: I remember thinking when Epstein killed himself. I never met Epstein, but I mean, he, you know, knew everybody. I mean, I will say, I mean in his, you know, in the defensive, people who got caught up in this because they went to dinner at Epstein’s like that George Stephanopoulos, for example, who I disagree with on everything. But like, like I know George and I, I don’t think George was having sex with kids at Epstein. It’s like Epstein was, you know, just part of like the social fabric, right? And Trump knew him for, for that reason also.

But when he killed himself, I remember thinking people were like, “he didn’t kill himself.” I was like, hey, probably killed himself. You know, he’s in jail or whatever. His brother Mark called me a couple days after he killed himself. And so began this, like, three year long conversation with Mark Epstein. And looking into it in a way I never thought I would. He didn’t kill himself. He was murdered in his cell.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: And I think that’s really meaningful. It’s the most secure federal lockup in the United States. How can that happen? It can’t happen without state actors involved.

The Official Story Falls Apart

SAAGAR ENJETI: That’s right. Look at the story that we were told at that time. Part of the information dump here by the administration is some hours of footage. We were told that footage didn’t exist. We were told that this was some guards who were, you know, off to. They fell asleep. This was. None of it exists. And actually, you know, it was all part of a screw up. And then the camera angles wouldn’t even be able to show anything. But that’s why they’re relatively confident. So where did this camera footage even come from?

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, the camera footage doesn’t even. First of all, it ends before they take his body out. Why can’t we see that? And the angle on it is absurd. But the real question, just not to be pedantic, but the real question is, who are the other inmates on that cell block? So no one came in or out of the cell block. I think that’s fair. It was the most secure cell block in that federal lockup in Manhattan. But who were the other inmates?

And I went to Department of Prisons, which is part of DOJ, and asked like, “what are their names?” “Oh, you can’t. For privacy reasons.” Really? These are people who can’t vote or own a firearm.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: You know, for the rest of their lives, but somehow they’ve got like a HIPAA law or something around who’s a federal inmate? Fuck you. Actually, yeah.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Sorry. It made me so mad. Because, of course, if Epstein was murdered, and it’s very clear that he was. He was murdered by another inmate.

SAAGAR ENJETI: That’s right.

TUCKER CARLSON: And we know that a bunch of them were transferred out of that unit right after he died. Who were they? Where are they now? Like, why can’t we get an answer to that question? So the whole thing that this tape shows he didn’t kill himself is like a joke. But worse than that, it’s a joke that we all get. Like, they’re not fooling anybody. So I feel like we’re at a dangerous point now.

The Lie as a Signal to Elites

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yeah, I agree. Because the lie is more indic. It’s not. The lie at this point is not even part of trying to convince any of this is true. Yes, the lie is a signal to everybody else involved in the scheme that to the, to the ultimate ends the United States government will go to protect all of you. And that’s the.

TUCKER CARLSON: For man, that’s smart purpose. Can you say that again? Okay, it’s. I’m sorry, it’s a signal.

SAAGAR ENJETI: The lie is not for you and me. The lie is for those implicated to say no matter what, we will protect you. And then we have to start asking the question why? As in what is the purpose of this entire thing? Why does it matter that it happens right before the Israeli Prime Minister comes to Washington for the third time? As you said. What is the linkage here between those two?

And the linkage is the fact that even a, you know, even a surface level view of Jeffrey Epstein of the case of the entire public record reveals Alex Acosta, who said he belonged to Intelligence. He said that the person who was responsible for the sweetheart 13 month deal, Alex Acosta, who was the U.S. attorney said, and I believe he testified this under in sworn testimony said “I was told he belonged to Intelligence.” That was a key part of why he, the charges were dropped against him. And you know, he got some sweetheart Palm Beach County Jail situation where he was allowed to leave on the weekends.

And why even though I know you’ll forgive George, but I actually won’t. I don’t have dinner with pedophiles. I’m not sure about you. I’m generally aware of the people who I am around and if I can get invited to someone’s house, I do cursory Google searches. That’s generally what you know, I think that’s normal. I, I don’t want to be in the presence of people who I think are like genuinely evil. That’s, that’s what I think.

So for I actually can’t forgive many of the media figures and the, you know, the presidents, people like Bill Clinton, Kevin Spacey, all these other high profile figures specifically because it was all out in the public record. And then in particular all of these high flying Wall Street financiers and Deutsche Bank, remember they were fined I think was the New York Financial Services. I read that entire report. It’s one of the most extraordinary reports I’ve ever seen because they specifically talk about how the bank ignored almost every single one of its own procedures that it apply to any other client.

And that at the highest levels and remember I think is the Barclays CEO. He’s already been in trouble for this, for covering up much of this in one of the largest financial institutions in the entire world. You know, for example, Tucker, if you and I keep going to the bank and withdrawing $9,900 in cash and we do it for a couple of weeks, our banking institutions are supposed to call, you know, both the IRS and the DOJ and say something is going on.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, and they, and they will, they will ex.

SAAGAR ENJETI: And they should. Good, right. That is what. This is done for a reason. He did this for years. And the classification that the bank accepted was. It was just for tips. This is, this is what I mean about the highest level of the cover up and what the, what the cover up means for the system itself.

And something you and I were talking about recently is I really believe here that, and I’ve never believed it more that in a sense, you know, for elected government and for all the benefits of our republic and of representation, that elites actually have always mattered. And of course, who run, they’re the ones responsible for channeling public energy. This is the way that we’re set up, into law, into policy, et cetera.

And so this lie was a signal to the elites, it was a signal to Versailles. It was a signal to the court that the court will always be protected, no matter what. And it’s enraging at a moment when the court has never been more reviled by the public. It’s not just a spit in the face of the public. It really is like a late, you know, it’s the late 1700s kind of signal to the court that we will protect this institution no matter what. And it’s really question for the rest of us, as if we’re going to continue to put up with this.

The Controlled Narrative

TUCKER CARLSON: I wonder what our recourse is. And can I say one thing that I’ve just been. I was brooding about this morning when the Epstein thing first happened, when he died, and I. I was. I’ll plead ignorance and lack of interest. I was, like, distracted. There’s lots of stuff going on. I get a call from someone I know who I like, who’s a, like, true hardcore neocon, many of whom I liked personally. Who’s writing a book on Epstein?

Two people I knew together wrote this book on Epstein. I don’t want to name them. I don’t want to be mean or anything, but they’re like, “can we come on your show? We’ve written a book on Epstein and this whole scandal show.” I read the book and it’s very sophisticated, and it’s like, Epstein’s super bad. But the Epstein story is really limited to Epstein, this bad guy who died. And there’s no, you know, there’s no evidence it was part of anything bigger that had anything to do with other countries.

And they come on my show and I interview them and they’re like, “no, you know, yeah, there’s all this stuff, mysteries. We couldn’t get to the bottom the of.”

SAAGAR ENJETI: Of it.

TUCKER CARLSON: “But, you know, Epstein’s really, really bad.” And I, looking back, I’m like, that was all. Like, that was by design.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yes, Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: It was like, “wow, we’re exposed here and we need to, you know, we need to, like, throw. We need a Warren Commission. Actually.”

SAAGAR ENJETI: No, you’re right. Except a real one at this time.

TUCKER CARLSON: It didn’t work because, you know, Vanity Fair, to its great credit, wrote a couple of pieces, then they stopped covering. And I noticed, but they kind of got to the Wexner thing. Who’s this Wexner guy?

SAAGAR ENJETI: Who is.

TUCKER CARLSON: And what. What ties do these guys have to foreign intel services?

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: Which were deep. I mean, I. I think Ehud Barak, like, lived at Jeffrey Epstein’s place on.

The Intelligence Connection

SAAGAR ENJETI: His plane 30 times, lived often at his townhouse in Manhattan at one time the largest residence in the history of New York City, transferred to him by deed by Leslie Wexner, for what purpose we have no idea. He invested in Ehud Barak’s defense intelligence startup. And I think the defense intelligence part there may be even as interesting as the fact that it’s Israeli Prime Minister and former head of Israeli military intelligence.

I mean, this is what I’m saying about the money. The money is so important to the story because we already have documented cases of CIA, Israeli and others buying up private corporations which pose as, let’s say, cyber security firms that sell to the government or other governments and use those as backdoors.

So look, if you’re Ehud Barak, you’ve probably met some of the richest people on the planet. Why do you need these investments from Jeffrey Epstein? All people a tax advisor to the super rich. What did Bill Gates get from his repeated involvement with Jeffrey Epstein? Why did Melinda Gates divorce Bill Gates after years and of obvious knowledge of his philandering in the past? Are we really to believe it’s about philandering from 20 years ago, which is well known apparently within Microsoft? No, it’s because she probably started to get a little aware or perhaps there was something else going on there as to the extent of what that relationship was.

And the fact is, even from public reporting told that Jeffrey Epstein was seen by Gates as the conduit to win the Nobel Peace Prize. How, for what purpose? How does he have all of these ends with the highest level of the intelligence or the scientific community? And then of course, I mean, it doesn’t take a genius to see the intertwinement between the scientific community, the academic research, industrial complex and the intelligence community.

So all of these pieces, this is the unfortunate part. And even returning, like you said to him, being killed himself. Or him allegedly killing himself. Let’s not forget Michael Baden, who I think is a very, very authoritative figure. He reviewed all of the documents, the autopsy, etc, he said this is not a case of suicide.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’ve talked to him about it.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yes. And he’s one of the most famous forensic pathologists in America. And his research has been very, or his diagnosis has been very important in a lot of other previous cases which turned out to be true. And so when he looks at this and we have that evidence. When we have the cover up here now at the. I’m just appalled that this is happening at the highest level. But my only conclusion is just a return, is it’s just a signal to the court is, don’t worry about it, we’ve got you. It doesn’t. The people don’t matter in this case, man.

Why The Cover-Up?

TUCKER CARLSON: I think this for a bunch of reasons, it’s so obvious. It is salacious. People have followed it for years. The president promised to reveal the truth about this. Pam Bondi, as you said, went on television. So we have the truth and we’re going to give it to you. Yes, I think this is kind of. I think this is a big deal. It’s a really big deal. It’s bigger. I, Well, I hope so, too, actually.

So let’s just assess this logically. They’re covering up. They’re the DOJ. The current DOJ under Pam Bondi is covering up crimes, very serious crimes, by their own description. Why are they doing that?

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: So there are really only two potential explanations that I can think of. Maybe you’ve got another. The first is that Trump is involved. That Trump is on the list. They’ve got tape of Trump doing something awful. I don’t believe that for two reasons. One, I’ve talked to Trump about it a lot, and I know him. He’s not that, for whatever his sins, I don’t think he’s that guy, actually. I don’t think he likes creepy sex stuff. That’s just my view.

But moreover, but more, I think convincing, is that this is all information that the Biden administration has had. And if there was evidence that Trump had been involved in illegal sexual activity, you think the people who made up Russiagate wouldn’t have leaked it?

SAAGAR ENJETI: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: Come on, now. So the only other explanation that I can think of, again, maybe you’ve got another, is that intel services are at the very center of this story, US And Israeli, and they’re being protected. I think that seems like the most obvious.

CIA’s History of Cover-Ups

SAAGAR ENJETI: Have a history of this. There have been multiple documented cases of pedophilia inside of the CIA perpetrated by CIA officers. Documented that in many of those, I believe, a dozen cases. This was a BuzzFeed News piece years back where the CIA specifically did not want to prosecute those individuals in federal court for fear that they would reveal sources and methods if they were pulled into open court. And they basically just made it go away. The only time they actually prosecuted somebody for child pornography was whenever he had already being prosecuted for mishandling classified information.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, when they want to crush you, they put kitty porn in your computer.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Why?

TUCKER CARLSON: Don’t have a computer.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Has. No.

TUCKER CARLSON: Don’t own one.

SAAGAR ENJETI: If you’re an important person, you should be careful.

TUCKER CARLSON: No computer in my house.

SAAGAR ENJETI: This is an important thing, though, is that we already have documented cases of them covering this up with, I believe, the CIA Inspector general. I forget the exact quote, but he said something along the lines of, “You wouldn’t even believe the amount of child porn that I’ve seen while I’m on this job.” I mean, these are depraved. Look, I mean, it’s a large organization, a small percentage of the U.S. we can make that argument. And I think there is something pathological in the minds of the people who excel in this type of environment.

TUCKER CARLSON: Of course, it’s based on lying. Yes. And lying is the gateway drug to every other sin. Of course, in the veil of secrecy that protects CIA up to and including its budget, which we can know makes all kinds of really evil behavior possible. In fact, it inspires it. If you felt, if you had the cloak of invisibility, would that improve or degrade your behavior?

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yeah. Yes. Everyone knows. Everyone knows the answer to that.

TUCKER CARLSON: Of course, you’d be like, I’m invisible. At some point, you’re going to have to go up and go like, doesn’t make you a better person.

SAAGAR ENJETI: They see their own colleagues getting away with it. And it’s a permission structure. And so look, I mean, that’s a small case, but it just shows us that it’s obvious and it’s something that has been in. Multiple intelligence communities have been ensnared in this. Again, I highly recommend Darryl Cooper’s episode on the entire Epstein saga, because I didn’t know about this case in Nora.

TUCKER CARLSON: Listen to that.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Oh, right.

TUCKER CARLSON: I was informed, credibly informed by Mark that he was a Holocaust denier.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Oh, I mean, words. Words are supposed to have meaning.

The Neocon Connection

TUCKER CARLSON: And can I ask about the neocons who are. I mean, keep in mind that it was Jay Lefkowitz, who’s Bill Kristol’s lawyer, who represented the Weekly Standard when I worked there, who was an Epstein lawyer.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: And so, where is Mark Levin on Epstein? I noticed that all these very voluble people who do not hesitate before imposing their opinions on the rest of us suddenly don’t have very strong opinions about Epstein. What is that?

SAAGAR ENJETI: Every accusation is actually an admission. And so.

TUCKER CARLSON: But why is Mark Levin covering for Epstein? Yeah, that’s weird.

SAAGAR ENJETI: That’s a great question. And particular when he’s going to accuse you of being funded by the Qatari government and if only. Right. That’s what I mean about the accusation is the admission.

TUCKER CARLSON: Sorry, government, the accusation.

SAAGAR ENJETI: And they could concoct all these wild schemes about how Steve Witkoff or me or you or anybody else is funded by the state of Qatar, when in reality, I mean, as you know, it’s like we’re really. You guys want to talk about foreign funding?

TUCKER CARLSON: Let’s go.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Let’s take a look at your C3s and release. Release all of the data.

TUCKER CARLSON: Wow.

SAAGAR ENJETI: I would be happy to take a look at it for.

TUCKER CARLSON: For you, especially Qatar. I found out last night at dinner you went to high school in.

Foreign Funding and Hypocrisy

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yes, I did. Yeah. They love to use that one. I went to high school my last year. American School of Doha. By the way, I don’t think the Qatari government likes me very much because I’ve talked quite a bit about how a lot of migrant laborers are abused there. But of course they still find that that tenuous connection is some sort of admission. Supposedly I’m funded. The only people who fund me are my business and the people who are previous subscribers, which is great. And that’s part of the reason I can speak the way that I am.

I literally dare them to disclose their donors and those ties to the Israeli government and the Israel lobby. I dare them to do it and they never will, or any of the other foreign governments that directly prop them up. And this brings us to Epstein. Why? The Epstein Leslie Wexner foundation under Jeffrey Epstein paid Ehud Barak $2.3 million to write two papers. I believe he did not even finish the second one. This is a nonprofit funnel of money.

TUCKER CARLSON: Really?

SAAGAR ENJETI: What’s going on with that?

TUCKER CARLSON: Can I get that gig?

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yeah, that sounds like a great gig. For anybody out there who’s struggling with their bills, money is easy.

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Whenever you’re willing to engage in a lot of very sketchy behavior, and this is a pattern I’ve noticed all across Washington, is that they ignore strategically the Epstein story because it’s inconvenient. And it’s not. Or not even really inconvenient. I think it’s just so deeply enmeshed here.

And I just bring it back to Alex Acosta. He told us the truth once, which was or not us. He told them the truth once in sworn testimony. He belonged to intelligence. And we’ve never, I mean, with Maxwell, who we have all of these documented ties to Mossad and to the intelligence community and all these sketchy dealings and then his daughter working with Epstein. We have the Wexner foundation, which we know is highly involved in Zionist interests here in the United States of America. We have Epstein as well, who’s been linked to some of these organizations or at least through funneling money via the Wexner Foundation. We know about his past with money laundering. For what purpose? That is the crux of the intelligence community’s ability to move things around and to pay for off the books, extremely off the books activity. It traces back to the lying, as you said. That’s part of why we can’t have the truth around.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why can’t we have a country that can, that is sovereign, that can make its own decisions and restore health to our international relations where, where we have allies, hopefully many more than we currently have? We don’t have enough allies, in my opinion. I’m hardly an isolationist.

The Challenge of Transactional Alliances

SAAGAR ENJETI: We’re the wrong allies, we’re the wrong.

TUCKER CARLSON: Allies, but the number is dwindling. So it’s right. Only a couple real allies left. And I’m not even sure they’re allies, but whatever. But why couldn’t you have at least conceptually a situation where you act in your own interest and to the extent that other countries share that interest, there’s a union set of interests. You ally with them, you know, transactionally.

In other words, we’re both for that. We both want to build an oil pipeline somewhere, we both want this shipping lane open, or we’re both mad at this other country. You know, it’s like, why couldn’t you have that?

The Israel Trading Relationship Reality

SAAGAR ENJETI: It’s so difficult. I mean, that’s why I mentioned Israel previously, an example. I think it’s really important. I mean, if you were to listen to Fox News, you would think that this is the greatest juggernaut economy in the history of the world.

I mean, I had ChatGPT do a mathematical analysis and I said, give me five countries that best resemble the US Israel trading relationship. And it was Singapore. You know, countries like Singapore, Chile and Switzerland. And I love those countries. I have, I love those places. Yeah, frankly, I think Singapore has a better, you know, if we’re talking about grand strategy and all that of the list, that would put that one higher than any of the rest.

But we don’t talk about this in the terms of actual transaction because then people might actually start to ask a lot of questions. I mean, I remember this with Ukraine, I was like, we barely do bilateral trade with this country. It’s one of the most insignificant countries in all of Europe to the U.S. trading relationship.

We can talk at, you know, the way they blow it, they blow up the Israel relationships. “Israel does our dirty work for us in the U.S.” And I’m like, well, are they doing our dirty work or are they doing their own dirty work? And then basically passing the buck and the bill. Why would we out anyway? Exactly.

And so then it comes down to all these questions, like you said, of national interests. And even the exception that we make for this country is just so unbelievable.

The Jonathan Pollard Case

SAAGAR ENJETI: I mean, let’s take the case of Jonathan Pollard, who’s one of the biggest traitors in the history of the United States for passing classified information on to the Israeli government. They were caught out in the open. Prime Minister Netanyahu used to visit our soil and actively campaign and urge our presidents of the United States to pardon Jonathan Pollard for betraying our country to his country.

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you have any idea what they did with that classified information, those secrets?

SAAGAR ENJETI: Well, I actually have no idea, but what I do.

TUCKER CARLSON: They gave them to the Soviet Union. Oh, they. That’s right.

SAAGAR ENJETI: That’s right.

TUCKER CARLSON: And this was during, this was in the 80s, during the Cold War.

SAAGAR ENJETI: 1985.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s right, it was 85. I remember it well. I lived in Washington, my dad worked for the government and that was a, you know, that was a very serious. Whatever you think of the Cold War in retrospect. But at the time, the full focus of the US government was focused, you know, was in opposition to the Soviets and the Israelis gave a lot of that classified information from the US Navy to the Soviet government in exchange for allowing refuseniks, you know, Jewish Soviet citizens to move to Israel, which I’m totally for.

I mean, I’m glad that they got out. I’m glad that they got out of the Soviet Union and made it to Israel. That’s, I’m, that’s great. But they took our secrets and gave them to our main enemy, our really only global enemy. What?

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yeah. And then, and have the audacity.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well then how can you have a relationship after that? Yeah.

SAAGAR ENJETI: And have the audacity to come to our country and to lobby in seriousness to the presidents, to visit this man in prison, to grant him Israel citizenship, to grant him basically the moment he’s on parole, he immediately moves to Israel. He received a hero’s welcome and it remains there to this day. I mean, we would not allow that.

TUCKER CARLSON: This is not a healthy relationship.

SAAGAR ENJETI: This is not a healthy relationship. Exactly. And that’s an important thing for Americans to understand.

The Contradiction Destroying the Right

TUCKER CARLSON: One of the many tragic byproducts is I think it’s destroying the right. And I say that as someone who’s been on the right my whole life and my whole life I’ve been on the right and I really sort of believe in the basic ideas. And I’m not, not, I’m not a liberal, that’s for sure. In fact, I’m way more conservative than Mark Levin, that’s for sure.

But it’s like the problem is the promise of MAGA is America first. And the contradiction is just too obvious. You can’t, you know, if you’re Joe Biden and you’re senile and it’s being run by a bunch of sinister shadowy figures in the background and you do something like this, it’s like, of course there’s doing it, but if you get up and you say we’re going to restore greatness to this country, we’re going to do it by putting our own interest first. That’s what every country does. That’s kind of natural, it’s organic.

And then you put the interest of a country of 9 million people above your own in a way that’s just insulting.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: People can’t deal with that. Their brains start to explode. And I think this is blowing up the coalition. I hope I’m wrong. I support the coalition. All these people like “you’re not MAGA.” Really? Did you campaign for Trump?

SAAGAR ENJETI: Right, that’s right. I mean please you.

TUCKER CARLSON: But I’m liberal, okay. But I’m so I worry about that. I feel like that’s happening.

The Electoral Reality of Anti-War Support

SAAGAR ENJETI: I think you should be worried about it. And well look, we can parse these things at a variety of levels. So there’s, you said MAGA and I think that’s important. I think the vast majority of people who are self identified as MAGA, they supported the Iran strikes and they generally support President Trump and they have a lot of trust in the man.

TUCKER CARLSON: They do.

SAAGAR ENJETI: What I keep trying to tell people is people are saying, oh, there’s a split in the MAGA, but you said it correctly. The right, and I would look at the right as the coalition that delivered Donald Trump the first popular vote victory since 2004. The margin of anti war support for Donald Trump is his entire electoral margin in the state of Michigan. The entire electoral margin in the state of Michigan.

And I think that his ability to win Michigan twice now, three in three races is pretty damn important for looking at the so called realignment of the white working class and of this new coalition. Let’s also look. I actually on our show, our producer went to the Bronx AOC’s district and interviewed people who were AOC Trump voters. And the number one reason that we got from them was war. It was the promise to bring an end to the war both in Israel and Gaza and in Ukraine.

Because there is something visceral. Let’s say that you live in the Bronx and you’re having problems in your neighborhood and watching these countries get tens of billions of dollars.

The True Cost of Military Deployment

SAAGAR ENJETI: Three carrier strike groups of the United States of America were present in the Middle East specifically to back up Israel during the 12 Day War. I, you know, you asked Ted Cruz a very important question. Do you know how much that costs? I looked it up, you know, it’s actually public information. It’s about a quarter, it’s I believe it’s like a quarter billion dollars per group per month for deployment. That was just for the deployment.

The April operation that’s separate from weapons fire separate from all the. And by the way, that number which they will never release is in the billions of dollars. And then let’s take opportunity costs. We basically used up, you know, a massive stockpile of US Interceptors which are critical for our bases in Qatar or for everywhere else around the world on behalf of this foreign nation, which we were told repeatedly the reason we give it 3.3 billion a year was so they can defend themselves.

Well, if they can defend themselves, then why did it take the full deployment of the US Empire to basically shield it? And even then, in terms of its shielding, as you, I mean, I’m sure you felt the same way. I’ve been to Tel Aviv. Watching that city get rocked by rockets was a shocking experience. That was not what we were. I hated it too. I’ve been there. It’s a beautiful city. The people there are great. And to watch their cities, I mean, that’s some London level, you know, photography from World War II.

And so the fact that that happened and that also, by the way, we just increased the defense budget to $1 trillion for what purpose I can’t exactly tell you because even with that money all spent in the past, it doesn’t seem that we’re all that competent at building interceptors at ammunition. Russia, I believe, is a defense budget like more than a, what is it, one quarter or something like that of the United States produces more ammunition than all of NATO combined. How do these things happen? Right, so we have corruption.

The point is, is that MAGA and the right, let’s say the non MAGA right people who voted for Donald Trump in good faith on a variety of good promises, I think for those people and especially younger Americans, there is a visceral disgust at watching the level of tension and obsession over this foreign nation. And it’s particularly galling because we have people like Ted Cruz who say, “why are you obsessed with Israel?” And it’s like, what did I just describe here about this?

TUCKER CARLSON: Calling you an anti. Called me an anti semite. Ten minutes in.

SAAGAR ENJETI: It’s disgusting.

The Liberal Playbook on the Right

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s so exactly what liberals do. It’s so exactly the woke. Right? I mean that it’s bewildering and it’s dishonesty. I’m not engaging. I’m off the Internet. But I give up. But it’s so revealing. It’s like, wait, I just voted against this. I voted against not just the argument, but the style of argument of the left, which is to not engage with the points that you make at all.

To lie past them, ignore them, and instead attack your motive and your character. “You’re a racist.” “You know you’re getting paid by Russia.” We moved seamlessly from that to Mark Levin saying the same, exact same thing. “You’re a racist.” “You’re anti Semite, you’re hanging around with holocaust deniers.” “What you’re paid by a foreign country, Qatar,” which I still find hilarious.

For the record, of course I’ve never taken a dollar from anybody. I don’t even have investors. But whatever it. But it’s got a motive rather than us, rather than engage with what you said.

SAAGAR ENJETI: I saw this all coming a mile away.

TUCKER CARLSON: You did?

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Because I’m heartbroken to see it.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Well, well, you should be.

TUCKER CARLSON: This is why you’ve been. Because you’re smart.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Well, I mean I’ve taken a lot of. It’s cost me a lot of personal problems, I can tell you that. But I remember, I believe it was right after October 7th. Bill Ackman and a lot of other prominent Wall Street financiers who are very pro Israel.

TUCKER CARLSON: Bill Ackman’s done a lot for our economy, so.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Oh, that’s right, that’s right. I forgot about that.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m talking down publicly traded corporations and then shorting them. Capitalism.

SAAGAR ENJETI: How are investors doing? I would just ask people to go and take a look at those books, but whatever. Let’s take a look at Ackman.

TUCKER CARLSON: Very patriotic guy who’s done a lot for this country, so keep that in mind.

The DEI Regime and Pro-Israel Interests

SAAGAR ENJETI: Okay, well, this patriotic American and a lot of these other pro-Israel billionaires were literally compiling lists of students who were protesting the Israeli government’s response to October 7th. Many of these were American citizens compiling lists and basically saying “don’t ever hire these people” and circulating them around the highest levels of Wall Street finance, of technology. Getting people fired from law firms.

TUCKER CARLSON: They had just because they criticized America.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Because. Oh, because they criticized Israel.

TUCKER CARLSON: What about America?

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yes, that’s an important question. But what I notice, and I said this at the time, is for all of these people, it is now obvious that they never were really opposed to DEI. Of course, what they wanted, they paid for it. Yes. That’s a great point.

What they wanted was they want their interest group, Zionism in particular in support of the Israeli government to be included within the DEI regime. And that was a very important point because eventually that became fused somehow with MAGA. And that explains a huge level of a lot of very high profile, very, very rich people in technology, industry and in finance who supported the Trump administration.

And the promise effectively that has now been delivered is that by using this newly crafted DEI style regime, which basically uses the state and the police state as effectively a force for a political party in Israel. That’s another thing that I love when you say this as well. It’s not about even Israel at this point. We’re talking about Likudnik interests in the United States.

TUCKER CARLSON: A guy who got 30% of the vote.

Netanyahu’s Corruption and American Hypocrisy

SAAGAR ENJETI: 30% of the vote, who is under investigation for taking money from who? Qatar. Right. It’s amazing. He’s literally fired the head of his own FBI for bribery allegations from Qatari money in his government and has the gall to have his interest groups here in America accuse people like you and me of taking money from the very same government that he’s been credibly accused of taking.

Listen, I don’t know. Trump says he’s innocent or whatever. Pretty cheeky believing it. I would say it is cheeky. And to bring it back, I guess is what you said is about America and the fact is, is that we’re watching the weaponization largely backed by a lot of these people who have hijacked, I think, a large part of the American. Maybe they didn’t hijack it. Maybe I’m the idiot, right? I could be the idiot for believing some of these things.

Why did I read Christopher Caldwell’s book and listen to Christopher Rufo and others about the civil rights regime and all of this criticism, correctly, of Ibrahim Kendi and the Department of Anti-Racism and the enshrinement of DEI in the Civil Rights Administration, just to watch it get turned around. And again, not even be used against people who are anti-American, but people who are supporting a boycott of a foreign nation.

A country here now where students could burn an American flag and be fine, but if they protest, Israel could be liable for either deportation if they’re not a citizen or denied federal grant funding. The current Trump administration is suing, using the civil rights Title 6 of the Civil Rights Act, Harvard University, for not protecting Jewish students under the indifferent standard.

Now, that same standard was used for some of the worst excesses in the 1970s and others of the civil rights. These are things we’re supposed to be against. This is DEI run amok. And yet we’re watching this happen in our own government. And I don’t see, there’s so many people. Ben Shapiro.

TUCKER CARLSON: There are a lot of bias against Jewish students at Harvard.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Oh, no.

TUCKER CARLSON: Underrepresented.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Not last time. I, I mean, I, I guess what.

The Problem with Identity Politics

TUCKER CARLSON: I object to is lying, of course, above all. But also, I object to these kinds of identity politics. I thought the whole point was, were Americans by citizenship? Yes, citizenship matters. As it did in Rome. I mean, it did. Paul’s on trial in Rome and he’s like, “hey, I’m a Roman citizen.” They’re like, “whoa.” They back right off. Because that really meant something and should be. It should mean something, I think.

And they’re continuing in this weird leftist frame where certain people have more rights than other people.

SAAGAR ENJETI: That’s right. And that’s what we’re watching.

TUCKER CARLSON: I just couldn’t object to that more.

The Hypocrisy of Conservative Commentators

SAAGAR ENJETI: And, nor every American should. And look, you may not like these people. I probably wouldn’t get along with a lot of these people. But let’s sit here and talk about Harvard. I mean, to watch, literally, it’s been 10 years ago. I was sitting with my friends in the Daily Caller office, which we were very kind to hire me into, and we were watching Ben Shapiro humiliate triglypuff. Right? We were watching leftist students get triggered and cry when Ben Shapiro would visit campus. And we thought it was hilarious.

Ten years later, I watched students literally crying at a podium with the House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson next to them, talking about how “I didn’t feel safe while I was on campus.” And it’s like, well, why didn’t you feel safe? Because people were shouting slogans again, protesting a foreign government. Now that’s actually a lot more about the psychology of you.

But regardless, I mean, did we not live through a decade of snowflake and “fuck your feelings”? Because I was there for that. And I’m not going to sit here and watch people who made millions of dollars, Shapiro and Dave Rubin and all these other people making fun of student, leftist students, only to co-opt the same level of identity politics.

And about Harvard, okay, this is important. What is the problem? Problem with Harvard? To me, the problem of Harvard is it took our most elite institution. Harvard is the whole Ivy League, our most elite students, it crippled them with debt. And 41% of graduates now work in finance, consulting and tech. Okay? Some of the worst industries that are directly extractive of the American consumer, basically getting rich on their backs, addicting them to crippling financial products, technology consult. I don’t even know what a lot of people in consulting do. Apparently they make a lot of money doing it. Is that a productive industry for our country?

And then same Harvard University admitted the same, actually less students in the class of 2023 than it did in 1981. The US population has grown 110 million since that point. Now why do they do that? It’s for ultra exclusivity. It’s to jack up prices for their tuition. They admitted fewer students in 81 than in 81. And the US population has grown 110 million since this point.

TUCKER CARLSON: Has their administrative staff grown?

Harvard as a Private Equity Firm

SAAGAR ENJETI: Oh, of course. And, but actually you’re not even asking the right question. What about their endowment fund? They’re basically a private equity firm with a small education department. And you know this, they lobby against the endowment tax through Congress. The endowment tax says, “hey, increase your student body size relative to your endowment and you don’t have to pay any tax.” But they don’t do that because it’s all about artificial constraints saddling these kids up with debt, basically taking the best and brightest of the United States of America and turning them into cogs of the man of managerial capitalism.

That is not the Harvard University of the early, let’s say the World War II period. That is not the MIT. They’re all doing the same thing. Those universities were our crown jewel and got government money from them so that they could set up and go work in industries that were productive and beneficial to our country. That’s my current critique of Harvard. I think that’s one most Americans would agree with. I think that’s my critique of higher education in general. It’s not the Middle Eastern studies department. Okay. It’s not suing them under the Civil Rights act. And to just to watch this weaponization right now.

TUCKER CARLSON: Such a lie.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Like a lie.

The Real Demographics Problem at Harvard

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, if you really want to play the demographics game and who’s getting shafted and well, who gets into Harvard? Actually, let’s take a look. Let’s see the numbers. And does that reflect the US population? In fact, let’s get even radical on the subject. Let’s measure it against IQ tests.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, no, I’m sure it’s not, you can say, well, the American population, it’s not all qualified. Okay, great. So how about let’s use SAT scores as a proxy for IQ. Is Harvard letting in the smartest people?

SAAGAR ENJETI: No. In fact, there is a concerted effort right now to drop or abandon SAT or any other quality or quantitative measure specifically to enshrine more of this DEI style machine.

TUCKER CARLSON: So who’s actually getting discriminated against.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Exactly. And, and so then it’s too much, though.

TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t even want to have that conversation. I know the answer because I know the numbers, which I’m not going to repeat here, but because I don’t want to add to the identity politics stuff because I think it’s a dead end.

SAAGAR ENJETI: That’s not what we’re about.

TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t want to be about that.

SAAGAR ENJETI: We want to live in a more equitable country.

The Danger of Government Weaponization

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s toward it. But the problem is when you lie that aggressively and you use my government to do it and all of its armed institutions to do it, then you force me. You’re making people radical stuff.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yes, and they should be.

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, I don’t want radicalism, but they’re forcing. When the DOJ, when the Congress passes 22 anti-Semitism resolutions in the last few years and there’s still a lot of bias in America, and there’s still a lot of problems in America that are totally unaddressed and they’re getting worse. You turn people radical. That’s I, I’m worried about that.

SAAGAR ENJETI: One of those resolutions they passed through the House actually conflated anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism which is, I mean, they’re literally saying it is anti-Semitic, as in it.

TUCKER CARLSON: Is a crime to criticize a foreign.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Country, a foreign country, or even an ideology which believes in the existence.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why are they doing.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Of a foreign country?

TUCKER CARLSON: Why are they doing this?

The Theological and Political Manipulation

SAAGAR ENJETI: Well, I mean, look, it’s bonkers, man.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s bonkers.

SAAGAR ENJETI: It’s beyond bonkers. And I wish money were the answer. I’m not saying it isn’t just a critical part of it. It is a part of just this propagandistic campaign to convince that this is our greatest ally, that actually we would die before we would let any of them die. And a lot is enshrined, unfortunately in a bastardization of Christian and rabbinical theology as Ted Cruz revealed. I mean, actually what really revealed to me was he didn’t even really know what he was saying, what he was quoting.

TUCKER CARLSON: No idea.

SAAGAR ENJETI: And so but he was taught he.

TUCKER CARLSON: Didn’t know what book it was.

SAAGAR ENJETI: But that’s a legitimate belief. I mean, that’s in the Bible. Right? That’s how we end up with Brian Mast wearing the uniform of a foreign country in my Congress. And that’s what offends me more than anything is the only uniform, in my opinion that a United States Congress person should ever wear is that of the United States of America.

The Breaking Point

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, yeah. And I would say to the MAGA voters, this is the program we voted for, the one that puts our country, where we were born, at the center of the conversation, at the top of the priority list. Yes. So those are the rules. So and anyway, where does this go? I’m worried that the contradictions are too obvious, the lies are too transparent. This is too insulting. I can’t even deal with it.

I feel like I’m the least radical person I know. I just, I’m happy to not talk about certain subjects just so we can all get along. I’m a wasp. In the end, I don’t want conflict. Okay. And everyone thinks I’m but I don’t hate conflict, actually, but they’re forcing this on all of us and I feel like the system is breaking as a result.

The Breaking Point in Media

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yeah, I mean, I feel that I do. And the reason, I mean, it’s a – I don’t think Marx actually said it, but that, you know, in accelerationism, it’s about heightening the contradictions. It’s a Marxian theory. And in a way, like I do think that that’s what they’re doing to all of us is they’re forcing people who are sympathetic, who want to see our country first, who reject a lot of the premises of the left, spent a decade of our lives.

In my case, you’ve spent multiple decades of your life fighting against many of these forces which we found repulsive, which we blame for the destruction of our country. And then watching that get hijacked. And again, maybe I’m the fool. There was plenty of evidence it could go this way. I didn’t think it would. I didn’t think in particular it would go this far.

But it’s one of those where the breaking is happening at a voter level and in particular in the platform that you and I are speaking right now. I mean, as you know, I began my career by just going on Fox News. It’s how I got trained in television. Obviously you started and you’ve been on all these platforms. We could not even have this conversation – I would say 10 years ago, I don’t think that the distribution and the audience and just the entire network that enables this possibility was there, but it’s been felt at a deep level in the way that Oliver Stone’s JFK film released something in America in 1991.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s right.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Always been inside of us. But now we have the voice, we have the words. But next is the tools. And a lot of people thought we had that tools with this.

The Decision to Go Independent

TUCKER CARLSON: Can you just pause right now? So I should just say you alluded to it. You worked for me, not directly, but for a company that I helped start. And then at like a really young age, you decided to punch out. You’re one of the very first people I knew personally decided to punch out and go independent because you had this really clear and it turned out correct view that the two party system, well, there are differences between the parties, but fundamentally they were aligned on the big issues and that a lot of voters didn’t agree with their position on the big issues, mostly the economy and war.

And you kind of moved out into this independent media world at what age?

SAAGAR ENJETI: I was 28. I guess so.

TUCKER CARLSON: Crazy.

SAAGAR ENJETI: 28 years old. So I-

TUCKER CARLSON: If you don’t mind, if it’s not too embarrassing, because you told me I asked you a bunch of very specific questions about it last night because I’m in that business. I’m interested. What happened? Like how you leave the Daily Caller. You go on Fox a lot. You’re like a young pundit or whatever. So embarrassing. I did it too.

SAAGAR ENJETI: I know.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s so embarrassing. And then you decide to go independent. What happened? Can you give us that brief story? Because I think it says a lot about the moment.

The White House Correspondent Experience

SAAGAR ENJETI: Well, I owe a lot to the organization you started and to Jeffrey Ingersoll, to Vince, to Neil Patel and all of these guys. And the reason why is they put me in the position that made me have this realization. And what it was is being a White House correspondent and what I discovered as being a White House correspondent.

I mean, I don’t want to toot my own horn. I think I was good at it. I interviewed Trump four times in two years. I asked Sarah, you know, multiple questions for the record, multiple different foreign leaders, you know, got stories, scoops, et cetera. But what I came to understand in the White House briefing room is I would watch – so for people who don’t understand, in the front row is all the networks, the major networks run by the White House Correspondents association, which is a cartel, a non governmental cartel, which runs the entire – I can get into that later if we would like.

But I would watch every single person from the network ask some version of the same question, which was about Robert Mueller at the time.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

SAAGAR ENJETI: And I said, no one gives a shit about Robert Mueller. And I would always ask a question not about that. What I came to understand was that they were actually all performing for themselves. And what I really came to understand eventually was that the entire mainstream media is about performing for each other, for social and for career purposes.

But even more broadly is that the mainstream media is a trade publication, and it’s a trade publication for people in Washington and for people in power. There is a boomer legacy element to this, which obviously exists, but broadly, it’s not actually about informing the people. In fact, you know, in terms of the journalism that I did, I tried to always ask questions that I thought were relevant to the actual voters, but I didn’t realize how counter that was to the entire philosophy of a lot of the people who actually work and cover the media professionally.

The Machine Revealed

Then I came to see that Fox, CNN, MSNBC are all vital parts of this machine. It’s all part of a machine where Washington as the imperial capital speaks to each other. They’re conduits for information which is relevant only to individual node within the nexus. The voter did not matter in that equation.

So what I decided to do is I had this opportunity to go to the Hill, currently the hill.com and co host the show with currently my co host, Crystal Ball. And what her and I really bonded over, remember the first segment we really bonded over was just about the opioid crisis. And I was like, I think that this is one of the most under addressed issues in America that gets lip service, you know, at the White House and others. Nobody’s really doing anything about it. That’s a despair. Our life expectancy at that time was going down.

And so we just, you know, that’s that was kind of the evolution, like you said, of realizing that where the two parties agree and the media in particular focuses on is really the exact opposite of where most people are. If you spend a lot of your time with people who are not political, they don’t care about Robert Mueller, they don’t particularly care about most of the scandals in Washington of the day.

They’re like, “Hey, my mortgage is really expensive. My kids college really, if I was lucky enough to save for 529, the inflation has gotten so out of control, I can’t do that. I’m really worried about the loan that my child is taking out. One of my friend’s kids recently died of a drug overdose.” Exactly. These are the things that animate, you know, the kitchen table.

The Real Issues Americans Face

And about the concern and the feeling that our country is being taken away from me, the southern border. And it’s not just a feeling of there’s uncontrolled chaos at the border. There’s a feeling of the collapse of social cohesion in our country. All of us can feel it. If you go to another country like Switzerland or Japan with controlled immigration, you will realize how radical it is actually. And those are both very radicalizing experiences for me.

But I just returned to the point of why I wanted to go independent fundamentally is I wanted to cover the news in a way that I felt was actually applicable to the lives of everyday people. And I noticed a burgeoning movement on YouTube and in podcasts where this distribution platform basically allowed me to talk as long as I want to in the way that I am with you.

And I mean the most frustrating moments in my career – 24 years old, young, embarrassing pundit is being invited on Fox News at 11:55pm for a three person conversation about nationalism. And I got to speak for maybe 45 seconds. I can’t articulate all my thoughts on the subject and they’re actually really important. And that’s where the fugazi element of all of that, it became too much and I just felt so much more free.

The Leap of Faith

And by the way, as you know, at that time, everybody told me not to do it. They’re like, “What are you doing? You’ve got your career set, you’re a White House correspondent. You can go work at any of these other companies.” You know, a lot of other companies were trying to recruit me at that time. They said, “You’re an idiot for going to this unproven concept. You don’t know if it’s going to work.”

And it was, I mean, the greatest bet, I guess, of my life because we took this small channel, Crystal and I, of some 6,000, I think we had a hundred thousand subscribers in three months and we had an audience of, you know, millions basically by the time we’d left, less than two years later.

But that was the confidence that I had to go independent was I knew that the knowledge was there if it was working well, the knowledge, basically it became irreconcilable to be attached to a mainstream media organization. And I’ve talked about this publicly, but the owners and the people who work there, we were starting to become so popular that our comments were causing problems in Washington, is that people were getting upset at the things we would say.

The Pressure from Above

Advertisers or members of Congress, they would call our bosses. And pressure began to come down to kind of change the way that we would talk about certain subjects. This is, by the way, happens in every mainstream media corporation. It’s part of the reason that being the way we set up our business is so the vast majority of our revenue comes from subscriptions.

And it’s because we don’t want to be accountable to any advertiser or anybody else. We don’t even read ads on our platform specifically for that reason. And it’s all to insulate my ability to be able to come here and talk the way that I do about a subject I feel passionately about, let’s say Israel and free speech, which I know already, every word that I’m saying here is going to be dissected, is going to be used as an attack vector.

And in the past that could have cost me my career. And at the end of the day, that’s why I decided to leave, is to be able to speak the truth. That’s why Crystal as well, was the level of control. Inevitably, even with the freest hand possible, while attached to these behemoths mainstream media, it’s irreconcilable. If you want to tell the truth, you cannot be attached to any organization which depends on insider access and on insider money. You have to separate yourself from that entity.

The Red Lines

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, yes, that has been the experience of my life. What were the red lines did you find? So you’re young and you’re hosting this show on a kind of brand new medium. You know, this weird setup where you’re working for the Hill but you’re doing an independent show. You’re learning what you’re not allowed to say.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yeah. Can’t criticize the age of members of Congress. How did that work out, by the way? Conversations around age. Can’t criticize TikTok, the Chinese government. That was a big one. Can’t criticize or talk openly about Israel. Can’t criticize – my favorite was CNBC Jim Cramer that’s criticized Jim Cramer. Which is hilarious. If you go on Twitter, there’s an entire inverse Cramer index of basic-

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, people get rich. Betting against – get very rich. Jim Cramer is so stupid that people get rich taking the opposite advice.

SAAGAR ENJETI: I still laugh about that one. But my-

TUCKER CARLSON: What happened?

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yeah, I said he was an idiot. And you know, a little bit about that later.

TUCKER CARLSON: Your bosses are like, “No, no, he can’t say things like that.”

TUCKER CARLSON: You know, but no, Cramer’s very smart. He went to Harvard.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Pharma. I forgot pharma. We talked a lot about big Pharma. That’s, you know, that’s one. I mean, look, take a look at the ads really. But it wasn’t that it – because I didn’t actually change anything I said. But I can’t sit here and not lie to my, to this audience and say that it was never – it was always in the back of-

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, yeah. Oh, always. You don’t even realize how present it is in your head until it’s not there.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Look, I mean, I was young, you know, I need a career. I have to eat, you know, I have a salary. These are realities that I’m just laying out for people.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

SAAGAR ENJETI: And as you know, as free and as ethical as I tried to uphold myself and Crystal as well, we couldn’t, we just could not stay in that environment. And that’s why we decided to go.

The Independent Launch

TUCKER CARLSON: So then you decide to go and you basically take a version of the same show, totally independent, on the Internet, relying on subscriptions, mostly subscriptions rather than advertising for the reasons you just so well described. What happens?

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yeah, I mean, it wildly exceeds our expectations on the very first day of launch.

TUCKER CARLSON: Both on the first day.

SAAGAR ENJETI: The first day of launch. I mean, they basically enabled us to run the company for a year, which was insane.

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, in other words, you made enough-

SAAGAR ENJETI: We made it.

TUCKER CARLSON: Very first day.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: To run it debt free.

SAAGAR ENJETI: To run the company.

TUCKER CARLSON: How many investors did you have?

SAAGAR ENJETI: We had zero investors. The only investors, quote unquote, were my credit card account and her credit card account. So we took. It was a gamble entirely.

TUCKER CARLSON: If you don’t mind me asking, what did it cost to launch it?

SAAGAR ENJETI: I believe. I don’t know. It’s probably like 50 or $60,000, if I had to guess. But that was it. And the whole enterprise. The whole. Just to launch. To launch, not to run.

TUCKER CARLSON: In one day. You got a full year’s operating revenue.

SAAGAR ENJETI: What we were able to do. And actually enough so that we were even also able to hire like at the time, we needed a sound person. These are all important things. Lighting an entire technical team. The ability to make sure that we’re distributing faster. These are all more boring things for the audience. But things that may not is because it’s.

The Low Barrier to Entry in Independent Media

TUCKER CARLSON: Your story describes how low the barrier to entry is. If you know what you want to say, if you have a point of view, if you’re committed to honesty and independence, you can actually do it.

SAAGAR ENJETI: You can do it.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s why it’s so thrilling.

SAAGAR ENJETI: That is why it’s thrilling. I mean, I was taking a look at your setup this morning, and I was talking to some of your tech guys and I said, “Isn’t it amazing that we couldn’t even do this 10 years ago?” And I’m looking at your equipment. I have much of the same equipment. I mean, look, it’s decent money, but it’s not a lot of money, actually. And especially compared to. I mean, you and I have seen those. The Fox News New York control room. I mean, it’s like being in the International Space Station. It’s crazy.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, when they fired me, they came and sent their guys up here and ripped. Because I did my show from here for years. And they ripped out all their equipment, which is fine. It was their equipment. And so we’re like. And we have a full studio that we built with their money. My guys built it, but whatever. And they put all their tech in there and then they took it all away. I wasn’t mad, but I was like, “Okay, we have to. I have to pay for this now.” Out of my pocket because I unemployed.

And we just moved to our dining room table where literally our family dining room table. We’re sitting now and it didn’t cost that much.

SAAGAR ENJETI: No.

TUCKER CARLSON: So I think that’s the only, I never talk about money or business or, because I’m not an expert on either one. But I just think it’s so exciting to know that you can do that.

SAAGAR ENJETI: And I hope that’s inspiring to people out there. I think really what it comes down to is not only audience, but the ability to say what you actually think.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

SAAGAR ENJETI: And I’ve, what I have found is that some of the most miserable people in all of media are the people who work in these corporations because they know, they know and want to say many things you and I are saying. And they’ll tell us privately, of course, but they’ll never say it. And I don’t really know how much money that’s worth. But beyond that, I don’t really know how as a human being, you can just continue to get up and everything.

The Corporate Media Machine

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I agree and I empathize because I was a TV anchor for most of my life. I empathize with the guys who like get the guest read out. They sit down before the show. “Who are we interviewing today?” And there’s Mark Levin on there. And like, nobody likes Mark Levin and he’s horrible television, he’s screechy. And what he’s saying is like deranged.

And even if you sort of agree with Mark Levin’s point of view, you can’t have Mark Levin on tv. It’s just an insult to the audience and it’s insult the anchor and having to see Mark Levin and turning off camera, being like “this guy again, like, why are we doing this?” And they’re going to be like, “Oh, the second floor told us to do it.” Even if you’re totally unbiased, bored with, killing every Muslim or whatever their program is, that still has got to drive you crazy. It’s like an assault on your self respect every single time.

SAAGAR ENJETI: But what I found, and I’m sure you find the same, is that what I saw for them is they started to believe that proximity to power is power itself. And what I found really gross about that is they start to fetishize like the most ridiculous things, as in who gets the first rope line when you get to ask Trump a question. I mean, the amount of actual physical fighting that happens in that scrum, people would genuinely not believe or really. Oh yeah, I got hit in the head once actually with an elbow from a photographer for taking his spot. Even though there’s no unassigned spots. Again, these are minutiae.

But what I’m saying is it’s a level of psychosis that takes over because in the White House press corps, everything is about access to the President. And so everybody is jockeying in a zero sum environment where everyone is trying to get the interview or going to schmooze this person or that person. But the problem with that is they turn from practitioner starting to believe that they themselves are important. And this vital conduit of information and what you turn into is basically an apparatchik of the state environment that I’m talking about.

And so for many of the anchors and others, they live for the black tie war at White House correspondence dinner or getting invited to a cocktail party or a book party. I mean, this is the currency of Washington and of New York. It has been for decades. But you start to live, you start to fill that emptiness inside of you with the knowledge that you get the facetime with a sub cabinet appointee at a dinner and you can use that information because Senator Schumer knows your name. These are all very important things for the social capital.

And this is pathetic. I want people to know this is pathetic. And I watch people live their entire lives on Capitol Hill in the White House press corps, in television, another for all of these like imperial level events that are put on to just make them feel special and continue on in the machine.

And I actually didn’t realize how radical it was for people like you or people like me to say, “I actually don’t care about that at all. I don’t care if I ever go to another cocktail party or another black tie dinner or any of these things, simply to be in the presence of people who are actually powerful. I would rather just critique them and say what I actually think.”

And the irony of course is, as you have found out, when you say what you actually think and you are critical of them in an honest way, they take you so much more seriously. They laugh at you. When you’re one of those people who cares about cocktail parties or any of that, you’re one of the most useful cogs in the machine. It’s the people they can’t control or the people who they call because they’re the inconvenient voices.

Getting Real Information Outside the System

TUCKER CARLSON: So that was, it’s interesting to say that was my next question. So the whole process of covering the White House, being in the White House press corps Going to the briefings and the gathering and all that, going to the parties. Are you actually getting information?

SAAGAR ENJETI: No, I’ve never gotten more information than what I do right now. I actually, during the 12 day war, I literally never got more information from inside of the entire apparatus than I ever did when I was covering the White House. And it was because I was so critical of the Trump administration, of the direction that they were taking.

And many of the people who I spoke to, for the record actually were not. Almost none who I knew personally, almost all simply saw my commentary and agreed with me and wanted a conduit for information to be able to get out of there. And that was, that’s a great lesson, by the way, for any white aspiring journalists or others who listen is you need. They will take you much more seriously if you hit them in the face.

And hitting them in the face makes them kind of shocked because it’s so counter to the way that the machine works. When you work in the machine, they can call your editor, they can call your boss, they can call your advertiser, they can put a significant amount of pressure on you, but when they can’t control you, they start to freak out. And that is one of the most useful lessons of my life, actually, in terms of coverage and in terms of journalism and the ability to speak out. Speaking out can get you is unfortunately such a differentiator from where the entire like traditional system really starts to work.

The Price of Independence

TUCKER CARLSON: What’s the downside?

SAAGAR ENJETI: Well, the downside is a freezing out of the entire social movement of professional Washington. Washington is that professional Washington protects its own. It’s effectively is a jobs network for each other so that people who are in and out of government always have reliable sources of income.

Implicit within that is that “hey, this is what we think about Israel, this is what we think about X, Y, taxes.” These are, this is what we think about the carried interest loophole. We don’t talk about that ever. Step up basis. This is what we think about cutting Social Security. This is an accepted fact. We need to accept this, that it’s acceptable to kick elderly people off Social Security or Medicare or food stamps. And we just take this information and in exchange for that information, we get a job for the rest of our lives.

If I hadn’t gone independent, I could have easily relied on working in Washington till the age of 65 within the machine. That would have been actually very doable. And this was the risk actually saying what you actually want to Say that is the riskiest thing you can do within the system, and in exchange, you will no longer get invited to these dinners or any of these other things.

To be okay with that, you have to be okay, I think, with something that you have found as well, by being denounced by people who you knew personally or people who you would help in their career, people who in many ways, you’re like, “I would personally never do that to you. I can’t really believe you’re doing it to me.”

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, I know.

SAAGAR ENJETI: And the reason you’re doing it is, we all know what it is, is you’re being controlled by a broader and a bigger either financial or foreign lobby interest.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’ve had this experience.

SAAGAR ENJETI: This is the red line for you.

TUCKER CARLSON: Where you call people people, and you’re like, “I can’t believe you said that about me,” calling me a bigot or whatever, when you know that I’m not. And it’s, I don’t even go on the Internet anymore. So I have no idea what people are saying. But several years ago when all this began, I remember calling a couple people and one person, I said, “Well, let’s have lunch.” No. Wow. No.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Okay.

TUCKER CARLSON: So did that. So when you and independent, you’ve been in D.C. because you got there for college, you’ve been there for 10 years, you know a lot of people.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: Got there at 18, right? Yes, 18 was independent, 28. So you know a ton of people. You’re a social person, I happen to know. So you are going to tons of events and you have tons of friends, and all of a sudden you’re going off in a direction. You’re not spewing hate or bigotry at all, but you are saying things that other people are not saying. How intensely did people, you know, know try to bring you back?

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yeah, almost immediately. There were a lot of warnings about, “Hey, this is dangerous.” Or, I mean, really. Well, my close friends knew that. They supported me. But it was really like the professional friends, people who you’re broadly acquainted with, are like, “What’s he up to? What’s his deal? What’s happening here?”

And you, it’s incredible how small, how rapid that shrink can happen in terms of not being invited to these things anymore or just being as a social outcome, outcast or your phone stops ringing to various different things.

TUCKER CARLSON: Did you feel that right away?

The Breaking Point: Israel and Professional Ostracism

SAAGAR ENJETI: Almost. I wouldn’t say immediately, but it did happen quite rapidly. A six month, maybe a one year period. Israel was actually the final straw in particular after October 7th. That was almost an immediate cut off from the entire professional network.

TUCKER CARLSON: What did you say?

SAAGAR ENJETI: Well, I said that I think that the way that Israel was conducting itself in Gaza was not befitting of a civilized Western nation and that the United States didn’t have a compelling interest in what was going on there and that we should just focus on ourselves. I said all the same things about Ukraine and many of them agreed with me then. Apparently that was the red line for them.

TUCKER CARLSON: But what kind of reaction did you get?

SAAGAR ENJETI: Well, I mean, a lot of it is calling people in my social circle, asking why I’m so anti-Semitic now. Yes, that actually happened. And a lot of it is also just generally a freeze of communication or discomfort being in presence.

And I think people should hear about this because what I just described, that social capital, when that’s everything, this is how those norms are enforced within the system, even if you’ve never received any money from any of these people, which of course most of them have.

So you put all of that together and you really watch this professional nexus and others, where you’re just almost immediately rejected from the inner sanctums of the Imperium.

Finding the Alternative: The Independent Media Revolution

But I mean, something that traces back to wanting to go independent was this knowledge that outside of the Imperium are all of these other rising, almost revolutionary forces of the Joe Rogan podcast. Dave Smith, Daryl Cooper, Andrew Schultz, Theo Vaughn, all of these individuals.

By the way, many of the comedians I listed don’t even consider themselves political, but it’s because they’re not connected to the system that they’re able to say and observe truths. Nobody in professional comedy or Hollywood connected comedy or any of these other would ever dare be able to even give a voice to these types of ideas. And so I chose the latter over the former.

TUCKER CARLSON: What did you think of the… So I know all the people you just mentioned. I think so much of every one of those people. I’d add Tim Dillon to that list.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Of course, wonderful person. But the… Now I’m being bitchy. I can’t control myself. The quality of the people. So you get expelled from, you leave, but you’re also shunned by your former world. You enter this new world that includes all the people you just listed. How would you compare the quality of the people?

SAAGAR ENJETI: It’s night and day difference and if we disagree, they just don’t care. There’s no professional freeze out. There’s no hard feelings.

TUCKER CARLSON: You could look right and say the things you just said that you believe so deeply I think are stupid. And he’d still go to dinner with you.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Of course he would. I disagree with Dave on a lot, mostly on economics. I don’t think he cares at all. We talk all the time. And that’s a really important point.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Is that the verboten issues and the enforcement of all of that is part of why a lot of these people have found this tremendous amount of success that they have. And that is what still gives me some hope about where we are.

The Personal Cost and Unexpected Rewards

TUCKER CARLSON: I totally agree that there… I believe in God and I do think that there’s an upside. You go through suffering, but there’s always a redemptive quality to it. And in this specific case, you find the new people. You do lose friends. Have you lost friends?

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yes, unfortunately, yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: And I still am sad about it. But boy, the people you meet are the most honest, interesting, decent. The quality, I’m sorry to reduce it to this, but the quality of the marriages among the people who are telling the truth versus the quality of the people who are paid to lie or who are too afraid to tell the truth. Boy, they have just happier people, better people.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Of course. Well, I mean, what kind of person who has small children at home would want to leave them for four out of five nights a week to attend book parties? I mean, to drink five or six nights a week. I mean this is literally the life that a lot of these people live.

TUCKER CARLSON: And if you’re a cog in a machine and you’re having Mark Levin on night after night even though everyone knows it’s absurd. How can your wife respect…

SAAGAR ENJETI: I don’t know. Yeah. Or getting up at 3:30am in the morning. I’m sure you used to in the morning show gig. And having to read from the prepared packet for yourself. “Good luck, honey, I hope the kids are okay in the morning.” And then reducing your life to all of that. For what, for what purpose?

TUCKER CARLSON: No, it’s totally…

SAAGAR ENJETI: And these are mechanical, but they’re macro and important.

Elon’s Third Party and the Consultant Class

TUCKER CARLSON: Nicely put. Yeah. So I want to ask you about the politics of all this because I feel like… So it is… What’s the date? Monday, July 7th. Things are moving so fast that who knows where we’ll be when this airs, which I hope is soon.

But as of this morning, Elon Musk is out there using the cover up that Pam Bondi is so clearly engaged in. Disgraceful, disgraceful cover up. And I like Pam Bondi personally, but I’m ashamed as an American to see what they’re doing. He’s using that to say, “Hey, we need a new political party. Everyone’s involved in the Epstein cover up.” Which is true. “We need an America party and I’m running it.” Where does this… is he serious? Where does this go?

SAAGAR ENJETI: Filed it with the FEC. I would give some caution to Elon Tucker. You and I have seen a lot of rich people come and go in Washington. Yes, the consultancy can come in from a mile away. Mr. Fiscally Conservative, Socially Liberal. I’m just going to put that out there. The Bipartisan Policy Center and all of these other people, they’ve rolled up that entire market. They have plenty to sell you PowerPoints about ranked choice voting and a few other things and all that. So for all of them, I wish you the best of luck because you’re all about to get filthy rich off of you.

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, can you explain a little bit? So I’m from D.C. so I know what you’re talking about. But for people who aren’t, what exactly are you saying?

The Third Party Grift and What a Real America Party Would Look Like

SAAGAR ENJETI: Well, I’m saying that there is a long fetishized idea of an American third party which is fiscally conservative, which is socially liberal, which is moderate on immigration and which is very comfortable with oligarchy. And those forces are extremely well funded and they have a lot of research which could back up whatever your proclivities are and they will happily sell it to you for 10 times market price and sit with presentations to convince you that this is a great idea.

And actually, I mean the irony is if Elon’s politics were more reversed in this sense, I actually think he would be onto something. So my belief is that both of the parties actually do have not answers directly but directionally to this fundamental problems of our age, immigration.

And I think the Republican Party obviously is solid or has come a long way on the issue of at least the base, let’s say that the voters, on the issue of immigration from the Gang of Eight party rebellion to where we are today. And immigration I still believe is one of the most central and important issues of our time.

But let’s put the other side and look, we can take this one big beautiful bill as an example. We increased the defense budget by 150 billion. Now I will not get into the actual specific Medicaid cuts, but I think everything in Washington is about priority.

So we extended the tax cuts from the TCJA Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. The vast majority of that benefit largely accrues to people who are already rich. Most of that in particular accrues either to the high W2 income earner. I saw somebody point out correctly that most of those people are Democrats. So it’s a little bit ironic if you’re just thinking purely in terms of politics.

We didn’t have any interest in closing the carried interest loophole. We didn’t have interest in looking at the step up basis, at looking at financialization. And there’s so many areas, tens of… hundreds of billions of dollars ripe for the taking without having to touch a single benefit to an American citizen.

And instead we started and instead rewrote the way that Medicaid and food stamp programs are going to work, which could potentially impact tens of millions of Americans. Now again, I think there’s legitimate criticisms around work requirements and welfare and all that. I don’t necessarily criticize that as opposed to this fetishization that I saw from GOP congressmen who were like, “Yeah, it’s good that people are going to lose their health care.”

And I said, “Look, whether these people are working or not, it’s not good that anybody loses healthcare.” And so that’s what I mean about where if Elon’s politics were flipped, I think the Democrats at least rhetorically do have correct focus on issues like healthcare and around or at the very least the way that our economy is structured.

Now, they may not mean it, and I don’t think they mean it in practice, but at least rhetorically. So if you were to marry those three issues about immigration restriction, about focus on quality of life, cost of living, health care, and also just broadly about restructuring our economy for productive purposes, that distributes not through socialism, but through a well ordered and a well regulated capitalism that distributes the benefit across all sectors of our society, now that’s an America party I could get on board with totally.

But there’s no funding for that. Right.

The Real America First Agenda

TUCKER CARLSON: Someone got up and said, “I’d like an economy where you don’t have to hire an illegal alien to raise your kids, your wife can stay home and raise your kids if she wants to.” And most women do want to for the period when they’re little. I mean most women want that and every survey shows that.

So if you were to say that, in other words, if you were to respond to the desire of the majority probably be shot to death. You can’t say that like it’s better to raise your kids into work in a bank.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: “Oh, right wing extremism.” Let’s just seal the borders till we figure out who’s here and restore meaning to citizenship. “What racist.” Maybe we should stop giving billions in aid to the… stop trying to run the world when we’re not good at it at all and just preserve our fundamental national interests. “Isolationist, Nazi, anti-Semite.” It’s like…

SAAGAR ENJETI: Or “socialist” when we talk about health care or…

TUCKER CARLSON: Any of those other issues. Yeah, I mean and I do feel like there’s a huge opportunity for someone who would talk like that.

SAAGAR ENJETI: That’s a real America party. I mean in his, at his best. The 2016 Donald Trump campaign was what I just talked about. I did not recognize it at the time. I was telling you yesterday that election night broke every political conception idea.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh man.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Which is the best thing that ever happened to me because it allowed me to free my mind to read all of these other people who I had never considered who I was told were illegitimate within professional Washington. And what it came to the conclusion it said professional Washington is illegitimate and has no idea what it allegedly its own voters.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why did so few people do… I had the same experience and, but which it was hard for me because I’ve been there for so long, but it was so liberating and I’m grateful for it and I’m grateful to Trump for that. But why did so few people do that?

The Empire’s Foundation and Modern Challenges

SAAGAR ENJETI: Because asking those questions. You know, that is not asking those questions and coming to what I think are the right conclusions about our mean about this restructuring of our entire political base. I mean the way that voting patterns over the last decade have changed is unbelievable.

And when you actually answer a lot of those questions, you come to them that are very inconvenient for the empire. You know, the empire currently runs on cheap labor, which is immigration related. It runs on war abroad, you know, military industrial complex, if you want to call it. But all of these foreign entanglements and pushing billions of dollars, you know, to policing the ends of the earth.

Something that I always want to come to the architects of the American empire, General Eisenhower and General Marshall. General Eisenhower in particular said it would be a failure if American legions acted as Roman that were deployed to the vast ends of the earth policing it. His vision for the American empire was to set up well ordered states in Europe and to them let them handle it from that point forward.

General Marshall and others, I mean yes they had the Marshall Plan, but the idea was about creating self sufficient efficiency that could allow America, that could return to where things were broadly in more than 1940s environment. But more, what I’m saying is that if you look at all of that and you start to speak against it and these are what the voters want, you start to come up against the most powerful interests in the world.

Healthcare is 20% of our GDP. We have the worst health outcomes in the developed world. That’s insane. Why? You know, it’s not because our healthcare system is not working all that well. It comes down to immigration. Immigration. We talked about cheap labor with war, that’s you know, foreign governments. It’s the ideology of the imperium which is all about basically transnational loyalty as opposed to loyalty to your own citizenship and really to your own country and then broadly about oligarchy.

The New Billionaire Class

And because when we look at the way how do you become rich in America today? A few years ago I went to the Forbes billionaire list and I just restricted the list to the number of new billionaires that were added to that list. The vast majority of those new billionaires, billionaires in America were people who worked in hedge funds and in finance.

And this is why in some ways the left is wrong. They often criticize. Let’s, they often criticize like let’s take Elon as an example and Elon is a complicated figure. But you know, look, I have a Tesla. I encourage everybody to get in one at least once because it’s like getting an iPhone 4 for the first time. It will change your entire conception of what a car is. Now if people were getting rich creating an American car company, I would be ecstatic. But that’s not what they’re getting rich from.

They’re getting rich from extractive, addictive capitalism, let’s say in finance, right. Basically creating, you know, unproductive trading systems which are only enriching themselves and then rigging our tax code so they pay lower taxes than small business owners maybe like you or I or the average person on the street who gets taxed at a higher rate for his labor.

Let’s take you know, other examples like the more, you know, all the so companies and so called great, great companies coming necessarily out of Silicon Valley. You know, the vast majority of that money, as Peter Thiel famously said, you know, “we’re promised flying cars, all we got were 140 characters.” There is something deeply true about that, about the experience of the technology industry has largely been about extractive capitalism and addiction on our phones and about industries that rely on that as opposed to products that make our lives better and make things.

Technology’s False Promise

TUCKER CARLSON: Boy, they lecture you about that. I have friends, although, yeah, this. This will ignite business, who I really like, who I consider so smart and interesting. But. And I guess we all get preachy about what we’re doing with our lives. I mean, I get preachy about journals. We’re here to tell the truth. Yeah. So I’m trying not to be too judgmental.

On the other hand, I don’t see technology over the past 80 years. Oh, what about antibiotics and the polio vaccine? Okay, great. But in. In general, net. Net, as we say in the douchebag industry, I. I don’t see it as a Net plus at all.

SAAGAR ENJETI: I don’t see it. Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: I see it as enslavement and a total disaster. Like it. But you’re not. But they’re like, what? Technology is making our lives better? Really? Tell me how.

The Sports Gambling Epidemic

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yeah, I mean, let’s take. I. I know you want to talk about sports gambling. It’s the perfect example. Right. So it’s something that’s been enabled by the phone and has led, in my opinion, to what is the next opioid epidemic that we will see in the next 10 years.

So in 2018, literally just 2018, the Supreme Court reversed a dis. Ruled a decision that restricted sports gambling to the state of Nevada, New Jersey, immediately. Chris Christie, by the way, is the person who brought this lawsuit which legalizes sports gambling eventually.

TUCKER CARLSON: He’s on the side of sports gambling.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Of course. He was the person who brought the suit. Well, what happens from that point forward?

TUCKER CARLSON: He’s the lowest ever.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Well, you and I are sitting here today in a country where. Where 40. 40 states plus the district of Columbia, sports gambling is legal. You have these sports gambling companies, FanDuel and DraftKings, which basically have legal monopolies from the states, from the gaming commissions of these states where they are allowed to operate. And it’s not a free market because of the licensure and the way that it works.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Not everybody can just become a gambler.

TUCKER CARLSON: I want to talk about this, I should say, because I’m totally ignorant on the subject, but I keep hearing from young people who are related to or who work for me about people getting in trouble with sports gambling.

The Predatory Business Model

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yes. And so how did this all happen? So in the span of, what, it’s seven years since that happened, 40 states are now legal. I just looked it up this morning. Several hundred billion dollars were gambled by Americans in 2020. $4 billion were gambled. In 2024. The gambling revenue was some $14 billion, just the revenue they were able to extract. That is larger than the motion picture industry, the box office industry in the United States of America.

The vast majority of that revenue, a study that came. Came out shows, comes from only 3% of gamblers. 3%. And the reason why is that gambling addicts make up almost 50% of the revenue. 3% make up 50%. Because they literally cannot put it down.

And what makes this story even crazier is that FanDuel DraftKings have the legal right in the way that they run their business. Where, Tucker, if you and I were actually good at sports gambling, they would effectively ban us from the platform. They would no longer allow us to place bets larger than, let’s say, $1.20. And the reason why is their algorithms are detectable for anybody who is actually gambling smart. And so they immediately will ban you from being able to bet any sizable portion of money.

Meanwhile, for those gambling addicts, those 3%, they have an entire VIP host directed service where DraftKings and FanDuel shower these people in free gifts, they call them every single day. They basically operate on the phone to make sure that there’s no. No track record, because they’re not supposed to do this. They’re not supposed to enable gambling addicts, according to the law. And what they do is they encourage them with free promotions or whatever, to keep gambling their entire life savings.

More recently, there was a man, I talked about it in my monologue on the subject, who gambled away over a million, I think $1.4 million. He never made more than $200,000. His wife is suing DraftKings because he gambled away his children’s life savings, college accounts, his Christmas gifts, everything. Every. Everything that he owned.

TUCKER CARLSON: He did.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Never gambled before 2020, and he gambled away everything he owned by 2024. DraftKings used to call him every single day. They used to say, “where, you know, we got what else you got?” They violated their own policies. According to the lawsuit. According to their lawsuit, the lawsuit brought by the wife, the. The income, if they tried to verify it, they would have seen that he was using all of these different assets, which are you know, obviously not from a W2 income, which is apparently violated their policy. They would have seen, as they admit in many cases, he was a gambling addict and they didn’t care. They allowed him to basically gamble away his life savings and not only enabled it, but encouraged it.

TUCKER CARLSON: So you know what I’m thinking as you’re telling me this amazing story? What I’m really afraid of is Sharia law. They hate us for our freedom saga. They hate us for our freedom. Sharia’s the threat.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Maybe they had something going on gambling and. But my point is so dark. And this is all on your phone. This is on my phone. This is on everybody’s phone. It’s almost every young man man’s phone in America. It’s part of the social fabric right now of male culture in the United States and all of it.

And I didn’t even get to the craziest part, which is that the bets that they’re making are these things called single game parlay bets, which are basically contingent, multi contingent bets. About four or five different things happening because the odds payout is much higher. You will lose with such regularity. Like in the state of Illinois, 60% of all bets were that type of.

TUCKER CARLSON: Can you give me an example? My ignorance is astounding on the subject. So I just.

SAAGAR ENJETI: So I’m not very well versed in sports, but let’s say we’re watching a football game. We would say that this person is going to rush more than 200 yards, the quarterback will score two touchdowns, and at the, at the end of the second half, the packers will be up by seven. So you would bet that. And so your payout on a $5 bet could be a thousand dollars. And that’s why it’s very attractive.

But what people don’t understand is that it’s priced that way, that $5 for a thousand, because you’re almost certainly not going to hit it. And that’s the vast, vast majority of the bets that Americans are making today because it’s fun. But my point around the fun is that the gambling addicts are the only people who enable your fun. And if you’re actually any good at this, you’ll get banned. It’s a totally unfair.

TUCKER CARLSON: How can they? How can they. Well, that’s totally. And Vegas is the same way, Vegas.

The Social Costs of Sports Gambling

SAAGAR ENJETI: Is the same way of how they back off people who are good at card counting. That’s where the custom, what was legacy granted into the sports gambling houses comes from. Regulators don’t care about any of this and legislators why because they’re getting filthy rich revenues off of this from the state.

But my contention is, if you look at the social cost of every single state where sports gambling has been legalized, we’ve seen an increase in bankruptcy, particularly young men. We’ve seen a rise in domestic violence, intimate partner violence, largely when bets lose. So a man’s bet will lose, and he’ll take it out on his wife or the kids that are in the house. It’s horrible.

We’ve seen actually statistically significant rise almost directly as a result of sports gambling. We are watching the social costs of our brother, our cousin or whatever, go bankrupt or lose hundreds of dollars, get normalized into this environment of taking insane risks which you don’t even really understand.

It’s getting enmeshed. If you go to any bar in America during a sports game, you’ll find somebody there with their phone. And if you’re talking to them, they’ve got money on every play of the game. They’ll be like, “Oh, I had $20 that he would throw a touchdown in the very first quarter.”

Soon they’re rolling out products which make it so that you can bet every single play of the game. And they’re doing it live so you can do it there all on your phone. I mean, that’s basically, to me, that’s an emblem of where we have become, what we have become as a country. We use a smartphone as an addictive platform to enable one of the worst vices that we’ve always recognized in American history.

And my solution is simple: it’s not fair that Nevada had sports gambling. Let’s just make it in person. We have to introduce friction into the system. We do that for alcohol. We do that for cigarettes. By the way, cigarette companies are not allowed to sponsor and spend billions of dollars in advertising at the Super Bowl and pair up with professional sports betting leagues.

I’ve spoken with professional athletes, NFL athletes, who told me they have faced harassment from people who lost bets because of them. They’ll be like, “Hey, the kicker, you idiot, you didn’t make that. And I had $1,000 on some.” It’s ruining the game.

The gambling companies and the leagues are coming together. Tens of millions of Americans are borderline addicted right now. Hundreds of millions are actually making bets. And all of this is just a sleeping social revolution. And the country where parlay betting and the lingo that used to be known to the most degenerate guy who lives in Vegas is now common parlance in American culture and people call you nanny state or any of that. I just said I don’t even oppose necessarily the ability to sports gamble. I just think we should treat it any other vice and make it so that you have to get.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why not just say it’s disgusting.

SAAGAR ENJETI: I think it is disgusting and predatory.

TUCKER CARLSON: And by the way they, they’re praying as the crypto people do. Sorry. On the frustration and sadness of young men who know they’re never going to be able to afford a wife kids in a house.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Exactly. And that’s. They sell you the dream. All the advertisements are “you can get rich with your knowledge.” And as I just said if you actually do get rich they’ll just ban you or if you have the potential to.

The Collapse of Business Ethics

TUCKER CARLSON: Business wasn’t always this sleazy in the United States. There were self restraints. I mean I’ve never been that into business or never participated in business actually my own whole life. But so what do I know. But I have been here a while and I remember people had there was feeling well that’s just wrong. We’re not going to do that. Yes, taking advantage of people was bad, especially poor people. Payday loan was a really sleazy business. Charging 30% interest on a credit card. I mean your neighbors would judge you.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yeah and they should. But that’s the problem with collapse of social trust is that there’s not a lot of policing.

TUCKER CARLSON: Totally amoral predator took control of our society at every level.

SAAGAR ENJETI: That’s exactly right. And now the government is in league with them. They’re grant it’ll be legal in almost all 50 states probably by the end of the decade and all of this will lead to mass bankruptcy. All the social attendant costs of this but I think more importantly it shows when you have that collapse of social enforcement within your society you can just see how rapid I’m talking about a seven year period. This is not long ago that this was even not a thing that we went to bigger than the motion picture industry.

And you and I are talking before football season. All forecasts say that DraftKings and FanDuel will make more money this year than they have ever made before. And 2024-2023 was already a 23% rise.

The One-Sided Nature of Debt

TUCKER CARLSON: Why are people paying their gambling debts? Yeah, why are people paying their credit card bills? I don’t understand. I mean it’s so one sided. It’s you’re a college student and you get credit card offers, free credit cards, and you get lured into something this, you get destroyed by it, but you still have to pay your debts.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: So it’s all upside for them. And then people wag their finger in your face “oh, you a communist?” Am I a communist? No. No, I’m not. If you say why would you pay your debts? Why would you ever.

SAAGAR ENJETI: It’s usury.

TUCKER CARLSON: Pay off. It is. And they’re the ones who should be ashamed.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Not just ashamed. Our legislators should do something about it.

TUCKER CARLSON: I really do believe to start a political party, don’t pay your credit card bill. Do not pay your gambling debts. I really do.

SAAGAR ENJETI: It’d be a general strike against or student loan, honestly.

TUCKER CARLSON: But whenever. But what they do, and it’s the same people, they take the frustration, the people who are benefiting from DraftKings and Citibank, they take the frustration that people feel, the stupid new mayor of New York, and they move it into race hate. They basically take that momentum and they shift it into a safe direction. Just hate each other on the basis of the way you look.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yes, of course.

TUCKER CARLSON: And that’s very safe for their backers. But I’m just waiting for the guy who’s “no, no, the real criminals are the ones who are loaning you money at 30% interest or getting you to go bankrupt on a sports gambling app.” Those are the villains. Why don’t we go after them?

SAAGAR ENJETI: I agree. I’ve been waiting.

TUCKER CARLSON: I run for president, pay your credit card bill. I will send you money.

Economic Precarity and Political Frustration

SAAGAR ENJETI: Well, but that I’ve been waiting for somebody. I talked with a guy who’s an expert on the history of political parties and he said one of the most popular issues that I think that would resonate is banning people, employers who schedule closing shift and opening shift. It’s called cloping. Right. People who have to work until midnight and wake up at 6am A lot of these are the most precarious people in our economy who are basically screwed around with by their employers getting paid many minimum wage and feel the deep frustration of no power in their lives from financial institutions to their employers.

He’s “I genuinely think just an issue that would resonate so deeply.” And then I started thinking, I go, why is that not even a thing? And I go, oh, well, it’s because most people in Washington don’t even know about the term that I just used. And it’s about the everyday life of somebody who is worried about being able to buy a house. I mean, let’s even put buying a house out of that. That’s the American dream. I’m talking about. Let’s just making rent. I’m talking about being able to fill up your car.

I mean, large percentage of this country is a blown tire away from bankruptcy. A literal blown tire away from complete bankruptcy. Economic precarity to a level which is shameful whenever we have the richest country in human history. And you talked about Zoron, and what I really appreciated is, look, we don’t Zoron. I’m not pro Zoron.

TUCKER CARLSON: I get it.

SAAGAR ENJETI: But when he says, “Hey, I’m just worried about the rent and I don’t care about Israel because I’m going to stay here in New York,” I loved it. How I loved it too. That’s what all we need. That’s what all people really want. I remember when Trump first term withdrew from Paris and he said, “I was elected to be the president of Pittsburgh, not Paris.” And I was wow.

The Danger of Betraying Electoral Promises

TUCKER CARLSON: So that’s the problem. One of the most important thing, the problem of the DOJ decision yesterday to cover up the crimes of Epstein, which they are doing, is that it leaves people at the very end of their electoral options. It’s I voted for this guy, and I’ll speak for myself, I voted for this guy precisely because I’m really distressed. I want justice. I want honesty. I think secrecy abets evil. I want someone to focus on my country, all the basic things. And I think Trump wants all those things too.

But if you, when you allow something this to happen, people are “you know what? The system itself is beyond reform. There’s no reasonable step I can take to improve this country or my own life. I have to do something crazy.”

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: You’re creating true radicalism when you do stuff this, because what’s the option?

SAAGAR ENJETI: Well, that’s why, in a way, I want to hold a lot of these leaders to a higher standard, is because if you’re elected on that message and you betray that message, in my opinion, you’re more culpable than, let’s say, the idiots George W. Bush and others who really believed it. Right. They believed what they’re. They destroyed our country. I agree, but they, at least, at the very least, they didn’t lie to us as much about wanting to address the very problems that they created.

But when you have people Obama, Biden and Trump who are elected right now on the backs of fixing the most catastrophic presidency probably in American history. George W. Bush. But then to return to many, or in many cases even go further and not actually address those, I think you’re very culpable in that. And you reap what you sow.

I mean, you said you’re not a radical. I’m similar in disposition. I don’t want to see mass violence or any of these other.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, you’re a married father. You’re I am too.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: Totally vested in the future of the country.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Exactly. I don’t want that to happen.

TUCKER CARLSON: No.

SAAGAR ENJETI: But as an analyst or as somebody familiar with history, somebody who has an audience and can pick up on social trends, people are mad as hell right now. They are angry.

TUCKER CARLSON: Too mad.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Angry, too mad.

The Epstein Cover-Up and Public Trust

TUCKER CARLSON: No, I agree. I’m. I’m legit. That Epstein thing, it’s not even about Epstein. I can live. I think I know what the Epstein thing was. Everybody knows what it was. I think you porn is the same thing.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: They’re collecting information to blackmail people on you porn. You think a foreign government doesn’t have access to the back end of view porn? I think. I think they do. And so I get it. I understand, everyone knows what’s up. But to insult the population by saying, “No, you’re a conspiracy. Conspiracy theorist.” It’s I think you’re really playing with fire when you do well, especially.

SAAGAR ENJETI: When you said the conspiracy and then now reversed.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s too much. It’s too much.

SAAGAR ENJETI: That is too much.

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you know? I mean, can you call Pam Bondi and say, I think Pam Bondi is under a ton of pressure again, I’ve always Pam Bondi. I know her. I think she’s under enormous pressure. I don’t know how good she is under pressure, trying to be nice, but I don’t think that she’s a sinister person who is doing the work of Leon Black and Ehud Barack on purpose, really. But I wonder if they know this is a real thing here.

The Epstein Cover-Up and Elite Accountability

SAAGAR ENJETI: They have to know. And the reason why I think they have to know is that the breadcrumbs that got us to this moment have already been sprinkled. Cash Patel testified and said it was suicide. Went on the Joe Rogan podcast and said, “If I had that information, don’t you think I would tell you he killed himself?” I mean, that was basically this was an enshrinement of many of the things that they already put out there.

That and the criticism and really the outrage over each of those individual comments, let’s say the so-called Epstein files, released with many of the influencers. There was outrage at every step. So they’re not stupid at that point.

TUCKER CARLSON: But how can you say that thousands of children were raped but I’m not going to find out who raped them? How can you say that?

SAAGAR ENJETI: I agree, I agree.

TUCKER CARLSON: They said that, by the way, when Pam Bondi went on television, said “I have a videotape of kids getting abused.” I didn’t. I follow this case closely and I know a lot of the people involved, as I’ve told you, I had no idea. I didn’t know that. Really. Thousands of children got raped. Who raped them? Where are the rapists? Like, why aren’t they in jail? What? This is the Department of Justice.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yes, yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: That is so crazy. This is like the, this is honestly one of the craziest things I’ve ever seen in my entire life. And I just think it’s very dangerous to play around with this stuff. Like, very dangerous.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Well, it’s.

TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t want to want a revolution. But if you wanted a revolution, this is how you would act.

The Decline of American Elite Competence

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yes, yeah, it is. Because, I mean, I gave Versailles as an example. When you pick the court over and over again and the people start to wake up to that, bad things can happen. And this is something that I find really disgusting about American elites, is that for a long time the American republic and the elite system has been one that can actually cycle at least some of the wants and the needs of the American voter to basically placate it and keep it from going down the path of fascism or socialism.

But when you continue to just double down on the imperium and on what fuels the empire itself and you keep ignoring all of these things. I mean, I do think this bill is an important part of that. Like we’re increasing defense spending. The empire is not even good at what it’s supposed to be doing. It’s causing chaos abroad. The military industrial complex is not even good at creating weapons or ammunition.

The global financial system has been revealed as a complete ruse. We sanctioned Russia to death. Remember we said that they will never rise. Their economy grew and they were able to increase.

TUCKER CARLSON: I tried to tell that story and I went to the Soviet, Soviet Russian grocery store to. Not because I want to live in Russia though, it’s really nice. But to point out that everything you said was going to happen didn’t happen.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yeah, they’re doing fine. And what’s the lesson in that? Is that, you know, the ability to produce the goods that you need, the ability to produce the energy and to at least have a few allies who also reject the Western global financial system is all you need now to stand against the American empire.

I think that was actually one of the most important things that has ever happened because we threw it all at Russia over insignificant conflict involving the United States. And what has China been doing now for the last five years? Just studying. They’ve. Since Ukraine, they have been studying this.

Foreign Policy Driven by Special Interests

TUCKER CARLSON: And we did it because a small group of foreign policy and government officials deeply care about Ukraine. I mean they really care about Ukraine. Okay, that’s great. I deeply care about Sweden. You maybe care about India. Yeah, but you’re not driving our foreign policy. You know, they care about Ukraine for whatever reason, but they’re imposing that on a country 350 million people. Are you joking? You can’t do that.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Humiliated us, really, in the eyes of most of our adversaries.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, I’m aware.

SAAGAR ENJETI: The day that Russia can increase its GDP and can increase its ammunition more than all of NATO, while subject to the most devastating sanctions supposedly in the history of the United States, that shows that it’s all fake. And then that’s Russia.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, I agree.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Which is a much smaller and less much of a threat to the United States, let’s say, than any other country in the world. And all those other countries are studying this with a fine tooth comb to sanction proof themselves. So when the time comes that we’re really affected and this affects me and you and my kid or your kids, that we’re going to have a real problem.

Military Industrial Complex Failures

TUCKER CARLSON: I couldn’t agree more. And to spend a trillion dollars on something that’s not working. I mean, I guess of all the money you could spend spending in the military, decent people in the military, some.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Good, really good people actually went to them, that’d be fine. But it’s not, as you and I know.

TUCKER CARLSON: I read the other day, this analysis from someone I know who’s really smart, and it was. And the question was, will the United States use nuclear bunker busters in Iran? Okay, okay. So that would, for many reasons be, you know, the first time nuclear weapons have been used in 80 years. Kind of a big deal. So I don’t think anyone wants that particular Rubicon to be crossed.

So I was wondering if that’s going to happen. So I call around and the answer I got, which I think is true, we don’t have any nuclear bunker busters. And because we’re not good at building anything. We’re not going to have them for quite some time. Now I haven’t verified that, but I got that. I mean I think that’s true.

SAAGAR ENJETI: That’s insane.

TUCKER CARLSON: Now I don’t want to use nuclear bunker bus at all. And apparently it was George W. Bush who said we shouldn’t. So, you know, there’s a rare win for the Bush team. Thank you, George W. Bush. But if that’s true, you spend a trillion dollars and you don’t have a nuclear bunker buster.

SAAGAR ENJETI: I mean that’s the least of our problems. We don’t have basic ammunition.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, I’m aware. It’s the level of dysfunction is so overwhelming that. And that’s the military, which you gotta assume is more functional than say the Department of Transportation or Energy or Commerce or Interior. It’s gotta be one of the most functional departments. At least they actually pass a marksmanship test occasionally.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Then things are really in disarray and we actually need reform.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yes, immediate reform. Because I mean, I just think, I don’t know, I’ve almost come to the conclusion it’s we’re either going to have to hit a financial crisis or a war. That’s really the only time I think anything changes.

Iran and Nuclear Proliferation

TUCKER CARLSON: So where do things go politically.

SAAGAR ENJETI: That a lot of that depends on Donald Trump and how he handles his meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu and the next coming years. Because, and this is why I was so concerned about Iran and I think you were too. And also why the people crowing victory in my opinion will look stupid.

I listened to your entire interview with the president of Iran is very important interview at the very least because whether he means it or not, he’s trying to telegraph for peace and not only trying to telegraph for peace, naming Israel as the prime, as a prime provocateur, wanting better relations here with the United States of America, but also concerned about the fact that at least according to our president, diplomacy was at least used in some way either afterwards taken credit for or at least the perspective was given it was used as a ruse which will undermine our ability to future negotiate.

Let’s say you are Iran, which in my opinion what I took away from this is despite all of the “they’re genocidal terrorists who want to kill us all.” They acted highly rationally. They only struck Israel. They fired 14 missiles at the U.S. base. They gave us preemptive notice. They immediately then called it off, willing to sign a ceasefire. He seemed at the very least his ability to telegraph rationality in his interview with you.

What I take away from that then is rationally if you are the country of Iran and you look at the history now and the context in which this has now happened, I don’t see how 30 years from now we either don’t have an actual nuclear armed Iran or regime change.

Historical Precedents and the Begin Doctrine

Because every single time, let’s even look at Israel’s operations in 1981, I’m sure you remember Israel took out Iraq’s nuclear program or at least severely damaged a reactor. Now that was sold as it was a one time operation by the way, do you remember that the Reagan administration denounced it and we actually paused shipments I believe of F-14s to the country. Why? Because we saw it as an outrageous move which was destabilizing relations. Ronald Reagan, everybody you know, not some known anti-Semite but of course we’re not allowed to know our history.

The point though is that that preemptive strike in 1981, did it stop the United States from invading Iraq in 2003 for an operation regime change sold on the lie of WMD? The point is, is that it actually hardens Saddam’s resolve to at least create the impression of having nuclear weapons and for a time actually amassing other so-called weapons of mass destruction and hardened the want of Syria in 2007 when they did something similar.

If you look at the history here now of the so-called preemptive strike from Israel known as the Begin doctrine around nuclear weapons in the Middle East every time there’s a strike, eventually it leads to regime change. So Iraq regime change, Syria regime change. With Libya of course they had all kinds of stuff going on with the Libyan program. Gaddafi did the smart thing at what he thought at the time, gave up his nuclear weapons and what happened to him, he was literally sodomized on camera. It was eight years later by the United States of America.

So the history of that in the region should really, you have to be very stupid not to look at every single one of those instances and say yeah, I don’t know about whether dealing with the United States and or Israel here in this context is one that I can trust. In fact I should probably just go get a nuclear weapon.

The North Korea Model

Let’s take the only a member of the axis of evil today that has never been bombed by the United States of America. North Korea. I saw a book about Kim Jong Un behind you. And I’ve recently had this theory. I’m wondering, is Kim Jong Il one of the most vindicated man in history? He was seen as an insane person. Remember the movies? And his liquor as well.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

SAAGAR ENJETI: His fundamental insight in 2002 was, “No, we don’t trust these people. We have to sprint to a nuke. We’re getting the H bomb, we’re testing underground. We will establish a credible nuclear deterrent.” He dies and his son immediately pours all state resources into creating an ICBM and a credible nuclear threat to the United States of America capable of hitting the United States homeland.

And he, in my opinion, my belief is Kim Jong Un will die of natural causes in his own bed because of that decision. That is the only way to assure that the United States will not mess with you.

And now actually, what Israel has created is a situation where the highly rational decision after your entire military infrastructure has been infiltrated by Mossad, you’ve watched with impunity, you’ve seen diplomacy used as a ruse. I don’t see how we can’t either go down the regime change path again or have a nuclear Iran now.

Netanyahu’s Strategic Demands

On top of this, of course, is Israeli action, Prime Minister Netanyahu. According to the Jerusalem Post, which is an Israeli media outlet, they write that Prime Minister Netanyahu, one of the chief things he wants to secure from President Trump is the ability to conduct preemptive strikes anytime he wants on the Iranian nuclear program, which, of course, we were told was destroyed. If it was destroyed, I’m not sure why we need more preemptive strikes. But he wants a rolling green light for the future, to be able to go in and take any things out at the time, which, of course, would only harden the strategic resolve of that country.

TUCKER CARLSON: But it can’t be done alone.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Of course not. Which they proved. They actually proved that to us when they said, “We need you to come in and finish the job” and to.

The Cost of Endless War

TUCKER CARLSON: Protect our homeland from ballistic missiles raining down on our cities. So any Israel, Israeli. And by the way, I come at this, you feel like you have to say it because you don’t want to be called a bigot again. But, like, just in general, I approve of and certainly understand every country’s obligation to act in its own interest, including defensively. So I’m not even contesting Israel’s right to be worried about Iran. They probably should be.

However, every strike by Israel on Iran, by definition requires the involvement of The US Military.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Correct.

TUCKER CARLSON: So we’re getting signed up for an endless war with Iran. And at that point, it’s like, no, this is my country. Yes. No, but like, I. I’m getting now I’m getting. This is what I was saying about radicalism. This is the kind of thing that could make you radical. Right?

The Embassy Bombing Precedent

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yes. And it’s bad for us, and it’s also bad for them. I mean, let’s take the April operation. A lot of people forget this. Why did Iran, In April of 2024, launch all those ballistic missiles at Israel? It’s because Israel bombed an Iranian embassy in the middle of Syria.

Now, according to them, it was an IRGC command center, maybe. I would say there are CIA officers present in every US Embassy in the world. So I don’t particularly want to open up that bag of worms. I think there’s spies in literally every diplomatic mission, including in Washington, which probably crossed paths with many of those. I don’t think those are legitimate targets, nor should they be. We shouldn’t open that up.

Well, it was because of that action that they knew would invite an Iranian response, that Iran then launched those ballistic missiles against Israel. But who shot down all those missiles?

TUCKER CARLSON: Bomb people? Embassies.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yes. That’s. Well, according to them, as long as you designated a terrorist, you know, base by your own definition. I don’t even know if the United States ever actually technically signed off on that analysis. You’re able to do that.

TUCKER CARLSON: There have to be some limits, mutually agreed upon limits to behavior. You can’t just shoot someone for pissing you off.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay. But you can’t shoot up churches, including the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. And you can’t bomb embassies, or else your embassies and your churches or your synagogues or your mosques or whatever, they’re all fair game. And you want to live in that world.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Right. It would be rightfully denounced as terrorism if that were done.

TUCKER CARLSON: There’s got to be some limit. What’s the limit?

The Psychological Toll of Foreign Wars

SAAGAR ENJETI: And even more. More big than that. What I said at the time was one of the reasons I didn’t want us to defend Israel is I know that if they didn’t think that the US Would come in and defend them, then they never would have done it in the first place, is that it would have restricted their freedom of action and the freedom of action of the Iranians. And the most likely outcome between that was probably some sort of diplomatic solution.

If they were actually forced to deal with this problem on their own terms without the Big Brother United States or at the very least the Big Brother, the United States equally distributed to both parties in regards to trying to bring peace and balance to the region. But it’s our unending and unquestioning support which enables Israeli belligerent action in the region which then invites blowback both on them but also on us.

OK, I lived during the 12 day war with the United States government warning me about terrorist attacks in my homeland. That is like 2005 Red terrorists, terror levels, remember flying back then very well. And, and that is a psychological toll on our population which was literally being done for a foreign country and worrying about every US citizen. There are millions of United States citizens who live abroad who were told that they had to be careful and going about their daily business in whatever country they happen to be in.

Now let’s say that’s in response to 9/11. Okay, we can justify that in terms of what the United States is doing as after being attacked on our homeland. But for another, as you said, it’s too much. It can lead to radicalization. I’m trying to resist that pull and I’m. What I’m trying to do here on my show as well is to talk all about this in a rational way. That’s why I talk about Switzerland and Chile. Just to put it in context who this country is and what we allegedly get out of it.

Let’s remove all of the veneer and the, the smears and everything else and let’s just talk in our own, own terms. And I have found that to be the enemy of the Ukraine discourse, of Israel discourse of so much of the way that we orient ourselves. I mean, you know, I always think about the Munich Security Conference. What, why, why are we obsessed with the Munich security conference? Asia is 50% of GDP in 2030. We should be going to the Singapore Security Conference and that’s the only one that actually should matter. But why do they all go to Munich? Oh, because they like Munich, they like Europe, they like going on vacation. A lot of them have studied there. They have this cultural affair affinity. I get it. I’m not saying that shouldn’t matter at all.

But you know, our forward, Lee, our forward looking leaders even back in the 1930s and 40s always had a very clear eyed view of the ability to balance what was actually in US strategic interests. And I think we really lost that from the 1990s unipolar moment onwards. And I’m watching it happen again. So you know, you asked me where this thing goes. It’s all basically it’s on Trump and his relationship with Bibi. I actually think he’s gambling his entire presidency. I agree with that on all of that right now.

The Gaza Disaster

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. And, you know, I have no idea what’s going to happen. I believe they’re meeting as we’re speaking. I know them both and I, you know, but I don’t know. But I’ve got to say, of all the kind of filthy disasters in the world, the one that I would want to stay away from with the most enthusiasm is Gaza.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: So how is it that it’s America’s responsibility to unfuck Gaza?

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yes. And that was the plan from day one. I.

TUCKER CARLSON: And what’s happened in Gaza is, is not defensible. It’s, it’s too much. I mean, the Israel Hertz said 17,000 children have been killed in Gaza. 17,000. I had to read it twice. They said that. So I, you know, I, I’m just citing them. There are lots of other estimates. But we’ll just go with the Israeli.

SAAGAR ENJETI: No, let’s go with the Israeli press, which are often more critical than ours.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right? Exactly. Well, they’re way more critical than ours. But, but let’s just go with that. Like, I, I think that that’s immoral. As a Christian, I’m very offended. There were, by the way, Christian among those killed there. They did nothing wrong. I’m offended by that. But even if I supported that, which I don’t, I would say I don’t, I don’t think I want to have anything to do with that. I don’t want to be tied to that. Why should I take responsibility for your crime?

The Failed Humanitarian Aid Scheme

SAAGAR ENJETI: President Biden sent his humanitarian aid float show. Remember that cost, cost probably at least a quarter billion dollars. That entire deployment almost did nothing. Currently, American contractors, I’m sure you saw this, are involved in this food aid scheme, which appears to basically just be like, look, I mean, I have to be honest here. It almost seems like a literal trap. Like there are hundreds of Palestinians who have literally been killed trying to get through.

TUCKER CARLSON: Is this the one run by an American evangelical preacher?

SAAGAR ENJETI: I believe so. I mean, it’s these American contractors, and this is set up through the United States government and all these private foundations. And I know this can get difficult. By the way, even talking about this I recently saw referred to as a literal blood libel is to mention the fact that. Fact that people who were coming for aid were literally gunned down and murdered, that’s supposedly a blood libel against the Jewish people.

Like, again, remove your rhetoric and let’s talk in the realm of facts. Your own newspapers are reporting the fact that hundreds of civilians were killed trying to get aid in Gaza. I’m repeating what your Israeli press is saying. I’m repeating what the independent press is saying, what the people in Gaza are saying as well. To the extent that there’s any independent oversight of this whatsoever.

And let’s return to the question of, I think what both of our orientation is. Is this good for our country? I would say no. You can, you know, you can talk in the realm spiritually. I would also just talk in the realm. We can talk in the realm spiritually and like kind of what that means to normalize saying, let’s kill children like Congressman Randy Fine or other member who are like openly celebrated and think it’s like a good thing. But we can ease and talk about what we said about children, national interests.

Is it healthy, is it normal to be obsessed with the way with defending supposedly the most moral army in the world when almost every counterterrorism and Iraq War veteran I know would be ashamed to have fought this way in the global war on terrorism? American troops, look, we made a lot of mistakes, but you cannot fault the American soldier or the American marine or the American airmen for not at many times putting their own lives on the line and many losing them to protect Iraqi and allies, Afghan civilians. In fact, often that was a core part of our mission. And they would, you know, look, I, I don’t think it was worth it, but when required, they were willing to do so. And I haven’t seen that in the way that this war has been.

Why Should America Fix Gaza?

TUCKER CARLSON: I haven’t either. But I, I don’t understand why we would take responsibility for fixing Gaza. I mean, that’s, we can’t fix Baltimore. What? For real?

SAAGAR ENJETI: Like, you’re right.

TUCKER CARLSON: What.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yeah. Why should we? And this has been the plan from day one. I want. That’s what I, I was going to say is. Remember back in November 2023, even shortly after October 7, Israeli Knesset members and others were writing in the Wall Street Journal, actually, it’s the United States that should take in people from Gaza after we expel them, or so.

TUCKER CARLSON: The people of Gaza are so dangerous. Every person in Gaza, including the children, they’re all terrorists. Because it’s genetic, right? They’ve been saying that it’s genetic. What are we even talking about? Like, what kind of. What is this? It’s genetic. I can think of a, a widely discredited political movement in Europe that used to talk like that. It’s genetic. Whatever. Anyway, but they’re too Dangerous to live next to. We can’t even have them in the region.

SAAGAR ENJETI: You guys, you guys.

TUCKER CARLSON: That is the purest expression of contempt for the United States I can imagine.

The Greater Israel Project

SAAGAR ENJETI: And that was step one. Step two was all of these broad plans about U. S. Peacekeepers. Now it’s broadly evolved. They’re mostly trying to pass it off on the Gulf, but as you and I know, there’s no Gulf military that could potentially occupy Gaza. It would of course either have to be fully funded by the United States of America or probably would result in some sort of US troop presence in Jordan serving as the supply mission with some sort of never ending deployment that would put people at risk.

Just like our current occupation in Syria where we continue to have hundreds of troops for what? If anybody thinks you and I are conspiracy theorists, let’s not forget that after this Israeli backed Al Qaeda takeover of Syria, which was I guess US and is really backed Al Qaeda takeover over of Syria, that the current, there are current negotiations between the Israeli and US Government right now this is out in the open about the United States actually filling in areas of Syria that were taken over by Israel and occupying them as some sort of safe zone between Syria and between Israel.

And again, first of all, this is a government supported by Israel and I guess by the United States now at this point. So why do the troops even need to be there? Also we were told that we have to stand up against countries seizing territory like Putin and Ukraine. I literally watched the Greater Israel Project march forward, you know, in the, in the last two years into Syria, of course west bank and now with Gaza and the, the, the expansionist behavior there, which we just don’t talk about here at all.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s, it’s like, seems like a violation of our norms.

SAAGAR ENJETI: I was going to. It’s, it violates every norm that, that we have about the way that a civilized nation were to conduct itself. It’s what we condemn and sanction.

TUCKER CARLSON: Isn’t that why we’re fighting Russia?

SAAGAR ENJETI: Exactly. And that’s where the hypocrisy of it collapses in and of itself. And the only way it’s justifiable is earlier what we referred to this like bastardized Christian and rabbinical theological doctrine. My favorite was the former US Ambassador David Friedman trying to lecture you about Christian, Christian theology. Yeah, right.

TUCKER CARLSON: And didn’t learn that much from this.

SAAGAR ENJETI: He didn’t learn much. Right. But my final point on that too – there’s probably no more contempt by a lot of the pro-Zionist movement for the actual Christian evangelicals who for whatever reason are so broadly supportive of Israel. They use them as pawns. They laugh.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, if they knew.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yeah, I wish they knew. And I know a lot of them listen to you, I hope.

TUCKER CARLSON: Nice people, good people.

The Exploitation of Christian Evangelicals

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yeah, if you ever go to Israel, probably 80% of the flight is going to be people from Alabama or from all across who are going to the holy city, which is great. That’s awesome. But while they’re there, they’re subjected to all of this end times propaganda about why it’s so important to support the state.

And I think what’s really sick is that the government, the Israeli government uses them as political pawns in our country when secretly they have nothing but contempt and laugh at them about, “Oh, look at these gross people in our streets,” or any of that. There’s no actual appreciation.

TUCKER CARLSON: I remember asking Benjamin Netanyahu over 20 years ago when terrorists were occupying the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, which is a city in which Jesus was born. So it’s arguably the most important church in Christendom. And the IDF fired into the church, killed, I think a bell ringer, I think, may have killed a monk anyway, killed Christians in a Christian church in a Christian city.

Formerly, it’s no longer a Christian city, thanks to its occupation. And I was totally for Israel. I’ve never been against Israel, actually, which is the hilarious part. But I remember saying to him, like, “You’re using American weapons to fire into the Church of the Nativity.” This was on CNN at the time. And boy, it was like, “Were you an anti-Semite?” No, I don’t want to fire into the Church of the Nativity. How is that okay? And why does everyone think it’s okay? It’s not okay.

Settler Violence and American Funding

SAAGAR ENJETI: It’s not okay. And we were talking yesterday about the recent settler violence that happened against these Christian villages. Part of why I feel upset about this is not just about – we rightfully, if you’re a Christian, you should also care about other Christians. But it’s like, guys, this is just normal behavior in the entire way that they act in this region and supported by the Israeli government.

Now, again, as somebody who cares about my own country, bad things happen all over the world – that’s a fact of life. But us funding them, it becoming a major political issue in our country. Unfortunately, you’re turning people like us. Look, Israel was never my number one issue. Never. I really did not particularly care. I spent time in the country, and I liked it. And that was kind of my – I said, “This Palestinian thing, it’s kind of messed up, but whatever, it’s their business.”

TUCKER CARLSON: Plus it was always like a lefty issue. All these people who you don’t agree with them on anything, and they’re running around talking about genocide. It’s like, just stop. I have had no desire. The last thing I want to do is get involved.

SAAGAR ENJETI: I felt the same, but I felt compelled once I saw not only the level – well, I saw the level at which the Likud interest started basically becoming a part of the mainstream American right.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Became even more concerned when I saw Likud interests running state laws, passing BDS laws on the books of multiple states in the United States, restricting the free speech rights of American citizens.

The DeSantis Contradiction

TUCKER CARLSON: Ron DeSantis signs a censorship law, a blasphemy law, in a foreign country.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Right. In a foreign country.

TUCKER CARLSON: I like DeSantis. That was the point where it’s like, you’re disgusting. I can’t.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Ron DeSantis, who banned critical race theory, then basically starts affirmative action for Jewish students in the state of Florida. I can’t genuinely think of a better representation of the modern American right.

TUCKER CARLSON: It just destroyed Ron DeSantis. And I really liked Ron DeSantis. I knew him pretty well. I always tried my best in my limited way to promote Ron DeSantis because I thought he did such a marvelous job during COVID in Florida. I was in Florida for part of that, and I was like, “Oh, you’re great.”

And he was totally destroyed by this one issue because it was utterly inconsistent with everything else he was saying. It’s like, wait, we’re against affirmative action. We’re against blasphemy laws. I thought we’re Americans. We have a First Amendment. How can you travel to a foreign country and sign a law restricting my speech rights?

SAAGAR ENJETI: You’re exactly right. The University of California system, the largest state in our country, is now saying that any organization that supports BDS will have all federal grant money pulled. Listen, this is insanity. That happened a couple of days ago. They’re warning students not – can you boycott the United States?

TUCKER CARLSON: Can you boycott other states?

Foreign Influence on American Policy

SAAGAR ENJETI: Of course you can. Of course you can. And that’s my point, is that it’s genuinely all just about a foreign nation and it’s in one political party’s interests and then hijacking it in ours.

And I guess I should give the disclaimer, as you do, because I already know the inevitable – I’m not an anti-Semite. I spent a long time in Israel. I like Israel. I have people who I would consider genuine family who are literally Israeli and living in Israel. I love them. It is not about them, it’s about their government, it’s about their party. And more specifically, it’s actually about my country’s relationship with them.

I wish them nothing but the best. And I actually, I just wish we just treated it like any other country. I have affinity for Switzerland, Japan, India. I’ve been all over the world, which is one of the great blessings of my life. And I just want to look at our relationship with all those countries on a relatively equal basis and just say, “Okay, what are we getting from this and what are we getting from that?”

And instead I’ve watched this religion both around support for Israel, but also Ukraine and NATO. NATO is a religion as you know. It’s transformed itself into a religion and not a defensive alliance. And watching that happen has been one of the most frustrating events of my life because the consequences in both of these cases are so dire for the people who elect a lot of these representatives to power.

The Pattern of Military Action

We got lucky that the 12-day war ended when it did. But to say that that’s the final solution is ridiculous because again, Israel bombs Iraq in 1981. Mission accomplished. Yes or no? Israel bombed Syria’s reactor program in 2007. Mission accomplished. Did it stop there? Gaddafi gave up his nukes? Is it only just about nukes? Of course it’s not about nukes. It’s about regime change. That’s what they want.

They’re open about it and please everyone watch Israeli television, there are a lot of people who translate it. They’re bragging about this stuff out in the open about killing Gazans, about regime change, about the way that they manipulate the United States. They say it in Hebrew. Ask your friend. There are a lot of Hebrew speakers here in America. They can translate it for you. It’s sickening. It’s out in the open. They make Fox News look tame.

TUCKER CARLSON: Which is hard to do.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Which is very hard.

Hope for Course Correction

TUCKER CARLSON: Boy, I just – I’m praying for Trump. I’m praying this is the last political solution to our problems and I think all my hope is in Trump and I hope that the administration course corrects and does it really soon.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Yeah, I think they need to on that issue with Epstein and broadly. You were elected on a message about America first and just so blatantly putting another country’s interests ahead of our own is not going to go unnoticed by a large segment of the American public and specifically younger people who are suffering right now.

The US economy right now is a disaster. The ability to buy a house, rates are very high from the Federal Reserve – that’s one thing Trump is correct about, especially on the Federal Reserve about high interest rates, about the fact that we have like a collapse of social trust. I spent a long time talking about gambling. We’re watching extractive industries get richer and richer on the backs of a lot of ordinary and working class people. Their lives are getting worse probably every single year.

And just touting GDP and “Oh, tax cuts for the rich” and all this stuff – I don’t think people can put up with all of that together.

TUCKER CARLSON: I agree.

SAAGAR ENJETI: And you have three and a half years left. You can still make a change if you want to.

TUCKER CARLSON: For people who aren’t familiar with your show, where do they find it?

SAAGAR ENJETI: Breaking Points. Breaking Points on YouTube, Spotify, wherever you find it.

TUCKER CARLSON: Congratulations on your well-deserved success and I hope you’re an inspiration to many others.

SAAGAR ENJETI: Well, you’re an inspiration to me. I owe a lot, all my career to you and so I have to say that. Thank you very much. Thank you for giving me the –

TUCKER CARLSON: I didn’t do anything. We just hired a lot of people at low wages, which I guess is kind of what you’re decrying.

SAAGAR ENJETI: But great to see it worked out though. Thank you. Thank you.

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