Category: Tucker Carlson
This Christmas season, Middle East Christians are under threat
Last December, my country finally threw off the chains of a hated, despotic regime. For many Syrians, it was a moment filled with hope — the belief that decades of repression had given way to a chance for renewal. Yet by March 2025, that hope had begun to fade. Parts of the country slipped into chaos. Videos circulated on social media and WhatsApp showing armed Islamist militias attacking civilian Christians, Druze, and anyone they branded as “infidels.”
Homes were burned. Entire families were killed. The first wave of violence was expanding and closing in on Christian communities of Suwayda in southern Syria, where many of my family members live.
While Israel has faced a campaign of withering international criticism, American Catholics and evangelicals are hearing very little about the plight of Christians from Egypt to Iran.
Then the killing stopped. It wasn’t widely publicized, but Israel — Syria’s southern neighbor — stepped in to prevent a massacre. Decisive military action stopped the slaughter of men, women, and children — our own relatives — in Suwayda.
For Arab Christians who have lived through so much war and persecution, it was a moment of relief but also a reminder of how little the world seems to care. When Christians are murdered in the Middle East, it rarely makes headlines.
As we come into the Christmas season and a new year, Christians are vanishing under Islamist violence and official repression.
In Lebanon, Hezbollah’s control and Iranian power have sent the Christian population into a tailspin. In Iraq, the number of Christians has dwindled to just over 100,000 faithful from over one million barely a decade ago. Even in small pockets of Christian life, supposed “safe havens” like Ain Kawa in Erbil, Iraq, Christians survive only because local authorities offer protection. From Sudan to Syria, ancient Christian communities have collapsed in just a generation.
The cradle of Christianity, with few exceptions, has become a region where believers cannot worship or gather without threats to our lives. Intervention from Israel helped prevent a massacre of Christian communities in Suwayda. But the world needs to pay attention to protect the Christians of the Arab world.
Western interest in the Middle East has mostly focused on Hamas’ brutal attacks on Israel in 2023 and Israel’s counteroffensive in Gaza. While Israel has faced a campaign of withering international criticism, American Catholics and evangelicals are hearing very little about the plight of Christians from Egypt to Iran. Legacy media ignores them. TikTok algorithms suppress them.
It is perverse that right now — with Christian communities across the Middle East facing extinction — prominent voices like Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes are ostracizing Christian Zionism as “a heresy.” In fact, Israel is the best friend Christians in the Middle East can hope to have. Alone in the region, Israel hosts a growing Christian population; alone in the region, Israel has intervened time and again to save Christian communities from eradication.
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Photo by AHMAD AL-RUBAYE/AFP via Getty Images
Our brethren in Syria and across the Middle East need our help this year more than ever before. Where churches are destroyed and believers persecuted, American Christians must pay attention, pray, and speak out.
More than that — contra Carlson — let us reach beyond our community. We can and must bring together a coalition of conscience in defense of persecuted minorities abroad, including human rights NGOs, brave anti-Islamist Muslims, and friendly governments in the region.
As Christmas approaches, the Christians of the Arab world are desperately calling for our help. This season, let us answer them.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.
When Fighting Antisemitism Becomes a Spectacle
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The right must choose: Fight the real war, or cosplay revolution online
Is principled conservatism dead? And would that even be good?
Robert P. George’s resignation from the board of the Heritage Foundation last week suggests a deeper shift inside the conservative world. George is one of the most respected conservative intellectuals alive — a Princeton professor who built the James Madison Program and shaped a generation of natural-law scholarship. His departure, prompted by how Heritage President Kevin Roberts handled Tucker Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes, exposes a widening fracture on the right about what conservatism is and what it should defend.
The first lesson conservatives should recover: Reason and faith are not optional in the public square.
I have watched this tension escalate since what some have called Charlie Kirk’s “martyrdom.” Voices from what garden-variety conservatives call “the far right,” what liberals lump together as “the right,” and what Antifa brands “fascist” are pushing for influence inside the movement. Some insist these agitators are leftist plants sent to fracture the right. Others believe God allows the intentions of every heart to be revealed.
Whatever the explanation, the attacks now directed at George follow a predictable pattern: an “OK, Boomer” dismissal of a man who has spent his life defending the unborn, natural marriage, and the created order.
Full disclosure: When I was a graduate student studying natural law at Arizona State University, George took time to meet with me and guide my work. Later as a tenured professor, I became a fellow in the very program he founded. One of my own undergraduate professors — the great ethicist Jeffrie Murphy — said George’s work compelled him to rethink everything.
So-called far-right critics now claim George will debate and even co-author books with Cornel West, with his ties to Louis Farrakhan, but refuses to work with people “to his right.” The charge — absurd on its face — is that he is some kind of “controlled dissenter,” a token conservative tolerated by the Ivy League so long as he stays within its boundaries. From there, the speculation drifts into unfounded theories about motives and self-preservation.
George does not need me to defend him. His life’s work refutes these claims. He has never backed away from his convictions. He has never trimmed the truth to curry favor with elite institutions. He debates West because he believes reason still matters, because he believes truth can be argued in public, and because he believes even fierce disagreement does not require abandoning basic human dignity. He refuses to compromise an inch while treating his interlocutors as human beings.
That shouldn’t be so difficult to understand.
In fact, that’s the first lesson conservatives should recover: Reason and faith are not optional in the public square. They are the foundation for honest argument, and honest argument is the only way a free people can persuade and be persuaded. If we descend into conspiracy theorizing, rage, or tribal loyalty as our primary modes of engagement, we abandon the very tools that made conservatism coherent.
Here is George’s warning: Don’t become postmodernists. Don’t imitate the left’s racial essentialism or identity politics. Don’t throw out reason because some Enlightenment thinkers misused it. If you want to rethink every narrative you’ve heard, fine — do it with reason, not with the power-dialectic that dominates progressive thought.
But principles alone are not enough. Being principled does not mean being naïve. Conservatives once understood strategy and tactics — long-term goals paired with immediate steps that move us toward them. I believe the United States should acknowledge the kingship of Jesus Christ. Presidents from both parties once referred to America as a Christian nation. If that is true, then we must engage publicly, argue publicly, and fight publicly for that idea of ordered liberty.
That means getting into the trenches. It means refuting Marxism and atheism clearly and without apology. It means being innocent as doves and wise as serpents, fighting to win without surrendering either virtue.
RELATED: Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, and the war for the conservative soul
Photo by Zach D Roberts/NurPhoto via Getty Images
What we cannot become is principled losers. The enemy welcomes our gentlemanly retreats. The progressive movement wants more than policy wins; it wants to redefine the human person, the family, and the moral order itself. A party that endorses abortion at any point, supports the mutilation of healthy children, and treats scripture as hate speech leaves no moral ambiguity about which side a Christian or natural-law conservative should support.
Read George’s arguments against liberalism. Read his defense of natural law. If you disagree with him, he will debate you — he always has. But you can learn from him that a revival of natural law and natural theology is essential right now. That requires teaching the truths in Romans 1 and learning from Acts how to speak across cultures and ideologies.
We are in a spiritual war. The weapons are spiritual, but the fight is real. The stakes are real. The consequences are real.
It is far better to be fighting through the mud of Mordor than fat, complacent, and conquered in the Shire.
The early social media reviews of Cruz’s 2028 POTUS trial balloon are in
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R) dropped out of the 2016 presidential race after his crushing defeat in the Indiana Republican primary by then-candidate Donald Trump. It seems that Cruz did not, however, drop his aspirations of one day taking the White House.
Cruz kept his powder dry during the 2020 presidential election and, in 2024, successfully ran for a third term in the U.S. Senate. Now, the 54-year-old Calgary-born senator appears to be preparing for a 2028 presidential bid.
Unfortunately for Cruz, MAGA influencers do not appear too impressed by his recent attacks on Tucker Carlson, which some regard as proxy attacks on Vice President JD Vance, who is far and away the 2028 Republican front-runner, by even Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s admission.
‘Cruz is gonna have a tough time.’
On Monday, Axios highlighted a number of signs that Cruz is indeed “laying the groundwork” for a 2028 bid, such as hitting the speaker circuit, endorsing midterm candidates, and securing a date to host a big donor retreat next year.
The liberal publication suggested further that it’s clear from his recent salvo against Tucker Carlson that Cruz is simultaneously courting powerful pro-Israel donors, some of whom aligned themselves with Nikki Haley in her humiliating 2024 GOP primary run against Trump; “staking out turf as a traditional, pro-interventionist Republican”; and setting the stage for a battle with Vance, who is not only a Carlson ally but unmistakably at odds with the tack taken by the George W. Bush-era GOP.
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Photo by Al Drago-Pool/Getty Images
Axios stated that “by poking at Carlson’s isolationist foreign policy views, accusing him of anti-Semitism and more, Cruz is putting himself on a collision course with Vice President Vance.”
Vance, like Carlson, has criticized the protraction of the war in Ukraine; cautioned against new regime-change wars; emphasized that the U.S. is “not at war with Iran”; and noted that American and Israeli foreign policy are not always aligned.
Cruz has indicated that similar foreign policy views expressed by Carlson are “bat-crap crazy” and “off the rails.”
Cruz, who is reportedly set this week to address the Jewish Federations of North America’s General Assembly, has also blasted Carlson for his October interview with Nick Fuentes, whom he labeled a “little goose-stepping Nazi,” suggesting that Carlson was wrong and “complicit in evil,” not for platforming Fuentes but for failing to adequately cross-examine him.
“We have a responsibility to speak out even when it’s uncomfortable,” Cruz said in a statement to Axios. “When voices in our own movement push dangerous and misguided ideas, we can’t look the other way. I won’t hesitate to call out those who peddle destructive, vile rhetoric and threaten our principles and our future. Silence in the face of recklessness is not an option.”
While Vance — whom Fuentes routinely attacks for having a wife of Indian descent — has made expressly clear that he thinks Fuentes is a “total loser” who does not belong in the MAGA movement, others have attempted in recent days to smear Carlson and Vance with a single stroke.
Cruz’s office did not respond to Blaze News’ request for comment.
A number of MAGA influencers criticized Cruz on Monday over the poor timing of the Axios piece and/or his apparent punches in Vance’s direction.
Human Events senior editor Jack Posobiec highlighted that Cruz’s latest dig at Carlson came just hours after President Donald Trump signaled continued support for Carlson, claiming reporters “can’t tell him who to interview” and that “ultimately, people have to decide.”
Political strategist and commentator Alex Lorusso wrote, “Right after President Trump says you can’t tell Tucker Carlson who to interview, Ted Cruz says we have a ‘responsibility’ to speak out against him. He has a rude awakening coming if he wants to run for president in 2028 by positioning himself against DJT.”
Normalcy advocate Robby Starbuck wrote, “Breaking: Ted Cruz will lose the 2028 primary. He has absolutely no chance against JD Vance.”
“It’s all about principle you see,” tweeted BlazeTV host Auron MacIntyre, “and that principle is power.”
The popular X user Swig noted, “Ted Cruz’s bizarre attacks on Tucker Carlson are simply a proxy attack on JD Vance. Extremely transparent game he is engaging in.”
“Judging by top MAGA influencers, Cruz is gonna have a tough time,” concluded Axios’ Marc Caputo.
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Tucker dropped the Crooks files — now Glenn Beck demands answers to 6 critical questions
On November 14, Tucker Carlson released an investigative video, exposing new details about Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old who nearly succeeded in assassinating President Donald Trump at his Butler, Pennsylvania, rally on July 13, 2024.
In the 34-minute video, Carlson made three bombshell claims:
1. The FBI spent months falsely claiming Crooks had no online footprint while hiding a years-long digital trail of extremist posts across multiple platforms, including Discord, Snapchat, and YouTube, as well as an extensive search history in the days leading up to the assassination attempt.
2. Crooks began as a pro-Trump, far-right teen advocating dictatorship and racial violence, then dramatically flipped in 2020 to virulent anti-Trump rhetoric and explicit threats of assassination, decapitations, and terrorism-style bombings.
3. Crooks was groomed online by a neo-Nazi handler linked to a U.S.-designated terrorist group, yet the FBI — under both Christopher Wray and now Trump appointee Kash Patel — continues to cover up Crooks’ full history, motive, and evidence, including physically scrubbing the crime scene.
After these revelations, Glenn Beck says there are six critical questions the American public must demand answers to.
FBI slept on Crooks’ kill list
For starters, Glenn is highly skeptical about the FBI’s dismissal of Crooks’ disturbing online activity.
During his pro-Trump era, Crooks directed violent comments almost exclusively toward Democrat officials — overtly calling for their gruesome deaths. This was happening under Joe Biden’s FBI — “a period when the U.S. government … was monitoring social media more aggressively than any other point in U.S. history,” says Glenn.
“People were arrested for memes at this time, but Crooks? Nothing … not a warning, not a knock on the door, not one single action,” he says.
Crooks’ 2020 plot twist: MAGA → Trump assassin
Sometime in 2020, Crooks’ digital footprint, per Carlson’s documentary, reveals an abrupt ideological flip. His comments were just as violent, but suddenly, they were directed at Trump and his supporters. He began mocking Trump’s handling of COVID-19, anti-lockdown protests, and conservative media figures, including Carlson himself, for downplaying the virus.
The FBI in its post-assassination attempt report, however, revealed only half of Crooks’ political leanings, omitting the anti-Trump part.
Neo-Nazi Discord daddy groomed him — crickets from FBI
Around the same time Crooks’ political leanings reversed, a shadowy online figure under the alias Willy Tepes, whom Carlson posits is a neo-Nazi Discord groomer affiliated with the U.S.-designated terrorist group Nordic Resistance Movement, began interacting with Crooks. According to the exposé, Tepes encouraged Crooks’ violent rhetoric, openly approving of his barbaric ideations aimed at government officials.
“So now you have our state department” and “our intelligence community that is monitoring people online, especially Nazis in the rest of the world and Nazis here, and yet there’s nothing. Not a single red flag is triggered, not a single investigation, no monitoring, no intervention,” says Glenn, noting that this same FBI was monitoring “Catholic churches and priests.”
Further, in the days leading up to the assassination attempt, Crooks, Carlson alleged, searched Trump’s name hundreds of times, as well as Jack Ruby, bomb-making, car and sniper attacks, successful assassinations, and how to evade police gunfire.
“All of these things should ring every NSA alarm bell. Nothing — again,” says Glenn.
“They didn’t stop him. They didn’t prevent or try to prevent. They didn’t warn anyone. Instead, as soon as he was shot, they rushed out a narrative — a very specific narrative — and then they shut down anything that conflicted with it.”
Trump’s FBI still running cover?
Perhaps the most head-scratching revelation in Carlson’s exposé is that Trump’s own FBI has continued to keep Crooks’ shocking history under wraps.
“I understand it when it’s Biden’s FBI, but now Trump’s FBI? Now, why didn’t Trump’s FBI immediately come out [with this information]?” asks Glenn, noting that Dan Bongino is on record reiterating the narrative that Crooks had virtually no digital footprint.
He uses the metaphor of an iceberg for the FBI. “You see an iceberg, and you just see just the top of it. Two-thirds of that is under the water, so we’re seeing the tops change,” he says.
“I’m questioning: Does anyone know how deep this goes? Because I don’t think it matters who’s running it.”
FBI: Fast cremation
The FBI also approved and coordinated the release of Crooks’ body for cremation just 10 days after the shooting.
“You don’t do that in a presidential assassination attempt. You don’t do that in a local homicide case unless you want something gone,” says Glenn.
The essential questions
1. Why did the FBI push the narrative that Crooks had a minimal digital footprint when quite the opposite is true?
2. Why did the FBI present only half of Crooks’ political history, hiding his era of Trump hatred? Who exactly was involved in the decision?
3. After the election and the appointment of Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, why did the FBI continue to uphold the original narrative? Who made that decision?
4. Given that the government constantly monitors potentially dangerous online activity, why did Crooks’ violent comments, suspicious search history, and consorting with a known Swedish Nazi group go ignored?
5. Why did the FBI clean the scene prematurely by allowing Crooks to be cremated shortly after the crime?
6. Why is it that every time our FBI and government make a mistake, it seems to point in the direction of “ignorance, negligence, hiding inconvenient data, shaping a political narrative”?
“There’s something very wrong. The official story is impossible to believe,” says Glenn, calling these questions not partisan but “self-preservation” inquiries.
“You can feel the republic slipping through your fingers. If we do not correct these things, we do not have a government of, by, and for the people.”
To hear more of Glenn’s commentary and analysis, watch the video above.
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The thoroughly unimpressive Mr. Fuentes
Tucker Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes was supposed to be explosive. It wasn’t.
Far from normalizing Fuentes or advancing his strange brand of “right-wing” politics, the two-hour conversation exposed him as a shallow, aggrieved figure without the intellect or maturity to lead anything. Carlson didn’t destroy Fuentes with debate. He did something worse: He made him boring.
Fuentes built his notoriety as a young “influencer” who mixes nationalism with online provocation. He’s outspokenly racist, anti-Semitic, and obsessed with pushing the limits of shock. And he’s managed to attract a following among disaffected young men — the “Groypers.”
Fuentes’ interview marks his peak — and his decline. Once the outrage fades, he’ll return to obscurity.
In recent years, Fuentes has tried to rebrand himself as something somewhat more serious. He talks about immigration breaking working families, foreign wars enriching elites, and a culture that mocks masculinity. Those themes resonate because they tap real frustrations that many Americans share.
But Fuentes offers no coherent moral or political vision. Others — better read, more disciplined, and far less toxic — make similar arguments with insight and integrity. The late Charlie Kirk, for example, famously wanted nothing to do with Fuentes and his followers for precisely that reason.
The grudge-filled path
Carlson’s interview focused less on ideas than on Fuentes’ grievances. He recounted his early days as a libertarian campaigning for Ted Cruz in 2015, his shift to Trumpism, and his viral rise after a debate with a leftist opponent. Soon he was clashing with prominent conservatives, especially the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro.
According to Fuentes, Shapiro and his allies sabotaged his career and drove him into exile on the “dark web.” At no point does Fuentes wonder whether Shapiro recognized instability and immaturity in him — or simply concluded that he wasn’t worth the investment.
Like many in his Gen Z cohort, Fuentes mistakes online engagement for substance. Without outrage, he has nothing. He’s poorly educated, reads little, and shrugs off legitimate criticism. The result is a young man trapped in perpetual adolescence, angry that the world won’t take him seriously.
Carlson’s indulgence
Carlson tries to humanize Fuentes, appealing to Christian charity and the value of learning from failure. But Fuentes clings to his score-settling. His list of enemies includes not just Shapiro but Charlie Kirk, Joe Kent, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) — and even Carlson himself, though he gets a temporary reprieve for offering the platform.
Carlson also attempts to rationalize Fuentes’ anti-Semitism, giving him space to “clarify.” Fuentes insists he doesn’t hate Jews personally — he just opposes Judaism as a “force against Western civilization.” He repeats conspiracy theories about Jewish control of institutions and denies the Holocaust.
Carlson pushes back, but only mildly. Both men protest that they “don’t hate Jews” and have Jewish friends, as if that were exculpatory. It isn’t. The exchange casts neither in a good light.
Empty provocateurs
The rest of the interview dissolves into incoherence. Fuentes casually praises Joseph Stalin, of all people, before the conversation fizzles. Carlson’s attempt to recast Fuentes as a misunderstood outsider backfires. The result is a portrait of a man whose only real claim to relevance is being disliked — and even that feels undeserved.
Carlson’s indulgence of fringe figures is becoming a pattern. Andrew Tate. Darryl Cooper. Now Fuentes. Each enjoys a sizeable online following built on provocation and grievance. And each, when pressed, collapses into self-pity and incoherence. These men are charlatans and grifters who don’t challenge the establishment; they merely rehearse falsehoods and conspiracy theories to raise their profiles among mostly lonely, disaffected young men.
RELATED: Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, and the war for the conservative soul
Photo by NurPhoto via Getty Images
The decline of two brands
Fuentes’ interview marks his peak — and his decline. Once the outrage fades, he’ll return to obscurity, remembered mostly as a cautionary tale about what happens when empty charisma meets unearned confidence.
Carlson, meanwhile, risks following him down that path. His willingness to platform attention-seekers may boost short-term clicks, but it erodes long-term credibility. Each indulgence costs him a little more trust.
The tragedy isn’t just Fuentes’ wasted potential. It’s the spectacle of one of the right’s most talented communicators lending his megaphone to a man who long ago proved himself unworthy of it.
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