The Saboteur
In June 2025, President Donald Trump stood at the G7 summit in Canada and was asked about Tucker Carlson. The man who had spoken at Trump’s nominating convention barely a year earlier had just called the president “complicit” in an act of war. Trump didn’t mince words.
“Somebody please explain to kooky Tucker Carlson that IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON!”
Then, for good measure: “I don’t know what Tucker Carlson is saying. Let him go get a television network and say it so that people listen.”
Eight months later, on February 4, 2026, Carlson released a podcast filmed in Jordan featuring an Anglican archbishop and a Jordanian banker. The episode, which bears the loaded title “The Shocking Reality of the Treatment of Christians in the Holy Land by US-Funded Israel,” is the most polished piece of anti-Israel propaganda Carlson has produced to date. It is also the latest salvo in a sustained campaign that has put Carlson at odds with his own president, fractured the Republican coalition on foreign policy, eroded evangelical support for Israel at a measurable rate, and according to filings with the U.S. Department of Justice aligned his editorial direction with the strategic communications objectives of the State of Qatar.
To understand Tucker Carlson in February 2026, you have to start in April 2023, when Fox News fired him. The network never publicly explained why, though reporting pointed to a combination of the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit, internal text messages revealing contempt for Fox’s leadership, and mounting advertiser pressure over his promotion of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory.
Carlson relaunched quickly, first on X and then through his own Tucker Carlson Network. Freed from editorial oversight for the first time in his career, his content began shifting. UFO conspiracies. 9/11 trutherism. False flag theories. But the most consequential shift was on Israel and it didn’t happen all at once.
The radicalization had a discernible arc. On September 2, 2024, Carlson hosted Darryl Cooper, an amateur historian who argued on the show that the Holocaust was not intentional genocide and that Winston Churchill was the “chief villain” of World War II. Carlson introduced Cooper as “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.” Republican leaders condemned the interview. Tucker seemed unbothered.
Then came the war.
When Israel struck Iranian nuclear facilities in June 2025, Carlson published a newsletter with the apocalyptic title “This Could Be the Final Newsletter Before All-Out War.” He called Trump “complicit” in an act of war and warned of “the end of the American empire.”
Trump struck back hard and publicly. The “kooky Tucker Carlson” Truth Social posts were just the beginning. At the G7, when asked about Carlson’s opposition, Trump publicly dismissed him with the kind of contempt he usually reserves for Democrats.
The dominoes fell fast. Marjorie Taylor Greene sided with Carlson. Alex Jones sided with Carlson. Steve Bannon gave Carlson a platform on War Room to warn that America was sleepwalking into catastrophe. On the other side, virtually the entire Republican Senate conference pushed back.
The most dramatic confrontation came on June 18, when Senator Ted Cruz sat down with Carlson for a two-hour interview that became the sharpest public airing of the Republican Party’s foreign policy civil war. Cruz correctly accused Carlson of being isolationist, amoral, and anti-Trump.
After the Trump break, Carlson seemed to lose any remaining inhibition about where his anti-Israel project would take him.
In September, at the memorial service for the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, Carlson delivered remarks that drew credible accusations of antisemitism from multiple conservative commentators. The speech further isolated him from Republican leadership but endeared him to a wing of the right and the left that openly hates Israel.
Then, on October 28, 2025, Carlson sat down with Nick Fuentes.
For those unfamiliar: Fuentes is a Holocaust denier, a white nationalist, and a misogynist who posted “Your body, my choice” after the 2024 election. His followers have pledged, on video, to “kill, rape, and die” for him. He actively urged his supporters to withhold votes from Trump to ensure Kamala Harris’s victory. He is, by any reasonable definition, an enemy of the Republican Party.
Carlson gave him a two-hour platform and treated him with warmth and admiration.
In the interview, Carlson called Christian Zionism “a dangerous heresy” and “a brain virus.” He said of Christian Zionists: “I dislike them more than anybody.” He named Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz, John Bolton, Karl Rove, and George W. Bush as figures who “drag America into endless wars for Israel.” Fuentes, for his part, told Carlson that the major obstacle to American unity was “organized Jewry.” He stated flatly: “As far as the Jews are concerned, you cannot actually divorce Israel and the neocons and all those things that you talk about from Jewishness.”
The episode drew over ten million views in its first twenty-four hours.
The backlash was severe. Ben Shapiro wrote: “No to the Groypers, no to the cowards like Tucker Carlson who normalized their trash.” Ted Cruz said it was “remarkable and sad, watching Tucker turn into Nick Fuentes.” Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, initially defended Carlson in a recorded video, then convened an emergency staff meeting: “I made a mistake, and I let you down.” The retraction leaked to the Washington Free Beacon.
But here is the detail that matters most, and it was noted by the New York Review of Books: during the entire two-plus-hour interview, Nick Fuentes never uttered the words “Gaza” or “Palestinian.” His concern was not Palestinian suffering. It was what he called the threat of “organized Jewry.” The mask slipped, and the face underneath had nothing to do with the Christians Tucker claims to care about.
The Fuentes interview was too raw. Tucker learned from it. The Holy Land episode, released February 4, 2026, packages the identical thesis — American Christians should abandon Israel — in far more palatable wrapping.
Instead of Nick Fuentes, the audience gets Archbishop Hosam Naoum, the Anglican Archbishop of Jerusalem who carried the Bible at King Charles III’s coronation. Instead of ranting about “organized Jewry,” the audience hears a thoughtful clergyman describing the challenges of his community.
Same destination. Different vehicle.
But the episode is riddled with problems that any competent journalist would have caught. Tucker introduces the Archbishop as having been “born in Jesus’s hometown of Nazareth” with a “father [who] was literally a carpenter.” The Archbishop was born in Haifa and raised in Shefa-Amr. Tucker fabricated a Christ-parallel narrative for emotional effect. The Archbishop references the 2021 Mount Meron disaster with a death toll of “150” — the actual number is 45 dead, with approximately 150 injured. Tucker doesn’t correct the error. Israel’s Christian population is presented as declining; in reality, it has grown from 34,000 in 1948 to 185,000 today the only country in the Middle East where Christian numbers have increased.
Most tellingly, the Archbishop himself repeatedly provides balanced information that Tucker systematically ignores. “In many places in Israel, you are respected, there’s freedom of movement.” “To be fair, they’re saying for safety reasons.” The Archbishop’s closing message — “Don’t divide us by your prayers” and “We are all God’s children” — is a direct rebuke of exactly what Tucker is trying to do with his testimony. Tucker says “That’s right” and moves on.
In May 2025, the Washington Examiner published an investigation that tracked something unusual in FARA filings with the Department of Justice. After Trump’s 2024 election victory, Qatar which has 74 registered foreign agents and 28 firms working on its behalf in Washington dramatically shifted its lobbying focus. Before the election, just over 10% of communications from Qatari foreign agents to media targeted conservative outlets. After the election, that figure surged past 50%.
Qatar’s biggest success, according to the Examiner, was Tucker Carlson.
FARA records show that Lumen8 Advisors LLC, a consulting firm paid $180,000 per month by the Embassy of the State of Qatar for “strategic communications,” helped facilitate Carlson’s March 2025 interview with Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani. The interview received six million views and was, by all accounts, friendly. The Washington Examiner’s Dominic Green later characterized it as “the centerpiece of an extensive Qatari influence campaign that intended to block Trump’s foreign policy.”
A separate firm, GRV Strategies, founded by Republican insider Garrett Ventry, receives $80,000 per month from Qatar for media relations. The Human Rights Foundation described Qatar’s operations as “a huge, flying conflict of interest,” noting the $400 million luxury jet Qatar gave Trump for his presidential library.
Carlson and his media company CEO, Neil Patel, categorically deny taking money from Qatar. FARA filings do not show direct payments from Lumen8 to Carlson. But the distinction between “a foreign government paid a firm to arrange your interview” and “a foreign government paid you” is legally interesting and editorially irrelevant. The result is the same: Qatar — which hosts Hamas’s political bureau, maintains diplomatic relationships with Iran, and has strategic interests that diverge sharply from Trump’s Middle East policy — gets favorable coverage on the most-watched conservative podcast in America.
In the interview, the Qatari prime minister told Carlson that Qatar had “never heard” or “never seen” evidence of Iran being close to a nuclear weapon. This directly contradicted the foundational premise of Trump’s Iran policy. Tucker nodded along.
The measurable impact of Carlson’s campaign on evangelical support for Israel is documented.
A Marquette University Law School survey found that while 70% of evangelicals over 60 approve of Israel, only 39% of those aged 18 to 29 do. Pew Research tracked a drop in support for Israel’s government among White evangelicals from 71% to 61% between February 2024 and September 2025. Carlson is not causing this shift alone Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes, and a broader generational realignment all play roles but he is its most powerful accelerant. His audience of millions of conservative Americans receives a steady diet of content calibrated to fracture the evangelical-Israel bond that has been a pillar of Republican foreign policy for decades.
The alarm is real enough that in December 2025, approximately one thousand evangelical pastors made the largest pilgrimage of evangelical leaders in Israel’s nearly 80-year history. The trip, organized by the Friends of Zion Museum in Jerusalem, was designed specifically to counter what organizers described as the “fraying rock-solid bond” between evangelicals and Israel a fraying they attributed explicitly to Carlson, Owens, and Fuentes, “whose audiences number in the tens of millions.”
This is not an abstract concern. Evangelical Christians are the single largest demographic bloc in the Republican coalition. Their support for Israel has been a cornerstone of U.S. Middle East policy across administrations. When Tucker Carlson tells millions of these voters that Christian Zionism is a “brain virus” and that supporting Israel makes them complicit in genocide, the geopolitical consequences are real and he is not targeting those of Jewish faith. He is targeting Evangelical Christians. That has always been the target all along.
There is a moment in the Holy Land episode that crystallizes everything. The interview with the Archbishop ends. A commercial break begins. And the ad that plays is for Tucker’s documentary “Replacing Europe” a film about the Great Replacement theory.
The ad states: “Governments of Western Europe and the United States did this on purpose to their own people.”
One moment, Tucker is the compassionate advocate for displaced Palestinian Christians. The next he argues Western nations are being destroyed by accepting the same kinds of refugees Tucker just praised Jordan for welcoming. He can’t seem to decide what he believes and when.
In December 2025, Tucker appeared on Theo Von’s podcast and declared: “I’m totally anti-Nazi.” By then, he had hosted a Holocaust denier, platformed a white nationalist, called Christian Zionism a heresy, broken publicly with a sitting president, been accused of antisemitism by a Republican senator, and forced the president of the Heritage Foundation into a humiliating retraction.
The Holy Land episode is what comes after all of that. It is Tucker Carlson 3.0 the version that has learned that Nick Fuentes is bad optics but that a persecuted archbishop is excellent optics, and that both can deliver the same message to the same audience with very different levels of mainstream acceptability.
The question is what happens when the most-watched conservative commentator in America with an audience nearly four times the size of Fox & Friends’ viewership, according to the New York Review of Books spends month after month dismantling the foreign policy consensus of his own political movement, at a moment of extraordinary geopolitical fragility, while his editorial direction aligns with documented foreign influence campaigns.
President Trump called him “kooky.” That was generous.
Tucker Carlson is the most dangerous man in conservative media today and not because he is wrong about everything, but because he weaponizes real suffering in service of an agenda that would leave America weaker, its alliances fractured, its enemies emboldened, and its foreign policy hostage to the grievances of a man who has never forgiven the world for taking away his television show.
The archbishop asked his audience not to divide. Tucker divided anyway. He always does.