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Home » Transcript: Israel First Meltdown and the Future of the America First Movement: Tucker Carlson

Transcript: Israel First Meltdown and the Future of the America First Movement: Tucker Carlson

Read the full transcript of Tucker Carlson Show episode titled “Israel First Meltdown and the Future of the America First Movement”, where Tucker Carlson dives into the heated debate surrounding America’s foreign policy priorities and the growing rift within conservative circles. Featuring discussions with Ana Kasparian and addressing responses from Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin, this nearly two-hour conversation examines the tension between “America First” and “Israel First” ideologies. As Carlson provocatively states, “The real battle isn’t with Mark Levin. The real battle is not to become Mark Levin.”

The Ongoing Fight on the Right

TUCKER CARLSON: Pretty much every morning you wake up and open your phone and think to yourself, I wonder if this roiling fight on the right is still ongoing, the fight over who’s a Nazi and who’s Nazi adjacent and who should be platformed and who should be de-platformed. That fight, the one that has mesmerized X users across the world. What is that fight actually about and how long will it continue?

Well, the first thing to know about it is that it didn’t start three weeks ago with Nick Fuentes’ appearance on a podcast. No.

This has been a fight taking place mostly behind the scenes since January, and that tells you a lot about what it’s actually about.

The Netanyahu Visit and the Push for War with Iran

TUCKER CARLSON: So here’s how it began. Donald Trump inaugurated January 22nd of this year. Almost immediately after, he is visited at the White House by the first head of state to come to Washington, the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu. And the visit is not simply a congratulatory visit.

They’re not actually allies in any sense. Remember that Benjamin Netanyahu was one of the very first to congratulate Joe Biden after the 2020 election, so there’s probably not a lot of warmth there. Just guessing. No. There was a purpose to the visit and the subsequent visits by the prime minister of Israel to Washington, and that was to get American support for regime change war in Iran to overthrow and replace the government of Iran, which the nation of Israel sees as its primary regional threat.

Iran has all kinds of very dangerous conventional weapons. The United States spends a lot protecting Israel from those missiles, and Israel is also concerned that at some point, Iran will either make or buy a nuclear weapon, leaving Israel no longer the only nuclear nation in the region. So that’s what it’s actually about.

And to be honest, you can see from Israel’s point of view, if you’re trying to identify long term serious threats to you, Iran would be at or near the top of the list, especially since Israel has taken out almost all the other threats. Really, it’s just Iran.

Is War with Iran in America’s Interest?

The question is, is it in America’s interest to participate in that war? And make no mistake, Israel wouldn’t last three days in a war itself against Iran. In fact, probably not even twenty-four hours. Israel’s population centers would be taken out by Iran’s conventional weapons. And at that point, the Israeli government could either nuke Iran starting a chain reaction that, you know, you can’t really predict once it begins or allow hundreds of thousands of its own citizens, certainly tens of thousands, to be killed.

So Israel could not do it alone, and no honest person suggests or would suggest that it could. It needs the United States. So the question from the American perspective is, is it good for America to get involved in yet another Israel inspired regime change war in the Middle East? There have been quite a few, most notably Iraq. Is that a good idea?

And so that debate began, and it mostly began behind the scenes. It didn’t sort of peek out into public view very often, but when it did, the people who wanted the regime change war against Iran almost, with almost zero exceptions, almost never admitted what they actually wanted, and they certainly never acknowledged what the debate was actually about.

It was about one nation’s interest versus another nation’s interest. Do those interests convene? Are they the same thing? Or are they at odds with each other? I can see what would be a good idea for Israel to want this. Is it a good idea for us? That’s the debate that never took place.

The Debate That Never Happened

And it didn’t take place because almost from the beginning, the people who wanted regime change war with Iran made the debate instead about “why do you hate the Jews? You’re a Nazi.” And of course, that was never what the debate was about, because Israel, the nation of Israel, the one with the parliament, the Knesset, and the military, the IDF, and lots of people and tech firms, is not, by the way, exclusively Jewish. And it isn’t actually the same as all Jews in the world at all.

And in fact, there are a lot of Jews around the world who have mixed feelings about Israel or certainly don’t want a regime change war in Iran. But the people who do want that in the United States, Israel’s proxies in the United States, its defenders, its professional defenders in the US, immediately made the debate about the Jews.

It wasn’t the anti-Semites who did that, actually. It was the defenders of Israel in the United States, not all of whom are Jewish, to be clear. They’re the ones who made the debate from the first day. “Why do you hate the Jews?”

And so, for those who were hesitant to get into another regime change war, it’s intimidating because you’re happy to have a debate any time of day about what’s in the interest of the United States, when should we project military force, what can we learn from the last twenty-five years, etcetera, etcetera.