Skip to content
Home » Transcript: Tucker and Saagar Enjeti on America’s Fastest-Growing Addictions – Tucker Carlson Show

Transcript: Tucker and Saagar Enjeti on America’s Fastest-Growing Addictions – Tucker Carlson Show

EDITOR’S NOTE: America’s fastest-growing addictions rarely get discussed as a single story — but Tucker Carlson and journalist Saagar Enjeti, co-host of Breaking Points, argue that online sports betting, prediction markets, marijuana, and pornography are all connected by the same pattern of exploitation, and increasingly by the same donors and political patronage. In this conversation, Enjeti lays out the data behind gambling’s explosive growth since 2018, the neuroscience of addiction driving it, and how the Trump administration’s regulatory choices have accelerated all four industries — before the two turn to what that pattern might mean for the country’s political future. This podcast episode was premiered September 3, 2026.

TRANSCRIPT:

TUCKER CARLSON: A couple of years ago, leaked internal documents from AIPAC showed that the single largest donor to the organization, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, number one donor, was a man called Leonid Rudvinsky. Rudvinsky was a Ukrainian-born pornographer. He was the owner of OnlyFans, one of the largest porn sites and human exploitation sites in the world, the site that has effectively turned thousands upon thousands of American women into prostitutes. And according to these documents, Rudvinsky and his wife had pledged $11 million to AIPAC.

Huh. He later denied that, but the documents remain. And you had to ask yourself, and many people did ask themselves at the time, why would someone who runs a pornography site donate this much money to a pro-war organization, neocon organization like AIPAC? What’s the connection between the two?

Huh. Then, of course, it was that same year, 2024, that Miriam Adelson became one of the biggest donors to the Trump campaign. Hundreds of millions of dollars. Now, Miriam Adelson is not in the pornography business that we know of, but very much the beneficiary of the gambling business. Her late husband was one of the largest proprietors of casinos in the world, Sheldon Adelson. And she became one of the biggest donors and partly because of those donations, became one of the driving forces behind our war with Iran and also immensely powerful within this administration. In fact, literally one of the people who picked employees of the Department of Justice, Mary Maitland, calling up PPO, Presidential Personnel Office at the White House. “I want this person at DOJ.” Bam. That person gets a job at DOJ. That happened.

But again, you have to ask, what is the connection between pornography, in that case gambling, and neocon politics? You wouldn’t have thought there was one, but the connection keeps showing up.

Here, for example, is a pretty amazing and telling clip from Ben Shapiro’s recent podcast. Watch this.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

SAAGAR ENJETI (in clip): In my opinion, as I said at the time, I thought the MOU was counterproductive, that it signaled weakness. That it actually gave credibility to the Iranian regime. Well, now things are starting to reverse. You have Operation Economic Outcast led by Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent. The goal is to economically strangle the Islamic Republic.

So the odds have been steadily going down about when we will actually have full traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, according to our friends and sponsors over at Kalshi. But they are rising actually rather sharply recently. Before April 1st, 2027, is now up to 42%. Before July 1st of 2027 is up to 53%. Honestly, I think we’ll probably get there before that.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

The Exploitation Connection

TUCKER CARLSON: So that’s a pretty amazing clip. Here’s Ben Shapiro, and if you see the whole show, he spends a lot of it, as he always does, pushing the United States to send more money and, well, more of our American soldiers and airmen into harm’s way fighting Israel’s war in Iran. And then he kind of seamlessly moves to a pitch for Kalshi, a gambling company with whom he’s a partner, apparently. “Not only am I excited about the war,” he’s effectively saying, “you can bet on its outcome. Here, sign up now for Kalshi.”

So here’s Ben Shapiro using his daily lecture on why war is good when it’s fought by Americans on behalf of a foreign country to seamlessly pitch a gambling company. If war wasn’t good enough, how about some gambling for you? Why not pornography? Why not weed? Here’s some prescription drugs.

Well, of course, virtually everybody who pushes for wars like the war in Iran or the war in Iraq or toppling the Syrian government or killing the leader of Libya, that group, we call them neoconservatives. Almost all of them are on board with all of these other public policy questions, every one of which has the net effect of hurting Americans, weakening people.

So what’s the connection here? There clearly is one, and we’re just guessing, but maybe the connection is exploitation. So the idea of the Iran War, like the Iraq War before it, was we use the world’s best-funded military backed by the world’s most powerful economy to fight a war on behalf of another country, a tiny country that can’t fight its own wars. In other words, take the United States and use it for our purposes to achieve something that we can’t achieve ourselves. Basically treat the population of the United States, the 340 million Americans who live here, like livestock and just use them.

And that’s really not so different from the attitude that, I don’t know, gets you to buy OnlyFans or promote gambling companies or push legalized weed or prescription drugs on the population. None of those things is good for people. And of course, you know that you would encourage your own kids to spend all day betting on their phones or smoke more weed. You probably wouldn’t want your daughter on OnlyFans, would you? But these aren’t your kids. These are other people’s kids. These are American kids. And why do you care? Because you can get something out of it.

So that’s a worldview that most normal people would consider repugnant.