Watch Young Tucker Carlson Deliver Stunning Takedown of ‘Anti-Semitic’ Pat Buchanan Over Rhetoric He’s Using Now

Young Tucker Carlson had a lot to say about the type of man he was to become.

In recent days, Carlson has emerged as a suddenly outspoken critic of Israel and its supporters in the United States, championing the causes of anti-Semites, assailing Israel over its supposed mistreatment of Christians, and accusing pro-Israel American Jews of not caring about their own country.

But it wasn’t always this way. In a stunning interview from 1999 making the rounds on Twitter, Carlson, then a writer at The Weekly Standard, excoriates paleoconservative elder Pat Buchanan for his anti-Semitic rhetoric and for playing the victim card when faced with criticism.

“I mean, this is part of the sad thing about Pat Buchanan as far as I’m concerned — and just to restate, I mean, Pat does raise issues that I think are important. I mean, I think, you know, the sovereignty of the American military, etc., I mean, these are not just crank issues,” began Carlson during an appearance on C-SPAN at the tail end of the 20th century.

“But unfortunately, Pat Buchanan raises them in a way that I think is discredited. And when attacked, he can always fall back on the line, ‘Well, the, you know, the tiny cabal that controls American politics doesn’t like me because I speak truth to power.’ This is actually, incidentally, almost verbatim what he said the other day that ‘I offend the plutocracy. That I’m a wanted man by the inside the Beltway people,’ and in every sense cast himself as a victim who is sort of a Karen Silkwood of politics. Someone who’s so truthful that he’s being hunted down by the conspiracy that runs Washington. I mean, it’s all a bit much. Maybe Pat Buchanan just says things that are kind of kooky and that’s why he’s being criticized.”

In the same appearance, Carlson argued that it was “perfectly fair to question America’s relationship with Israel,” but submitted that that’s not why Buchanan faced allegations of anti-Semitism.

“It’s this kind of, as I’ve said this, this relentless bringing up topics related to, Judaism. I mean, famously, Pat, you know, always beats up on Goldman Sachs but never Morgan Stanley,” continued Carlson. “I think, and it took me years to come to this position. I mean, I’m not throwing the term anti-Semite around, but you reach a point when you say, ‘Well, gee, you know, here’s a guy who has gone out of his way to, to defend [John] Demjanjuk and other accused Nazi war criminals, who’s constantly attacked Israel, who’s attacked American Jews for supporting Israel unduly, who’s implied that American Jews push America into wars in which non-Jews die.’ There really is, and again, I’m not hysterical on the subject, but I do believe that there is a pattern with Pat Buchanan of needling the Jews. Is that anti-Semitic? Yeah!”

HOLY SMOKES! MUST WATCH!

Young Tucker Carlson perfectly describing new Tucker Carlson, nearly twenty years ago.
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— Han Shawnity 🇺🇸 (@HanShawnity) April 16, 2024

“Pat Buchanan obviously has a lot of personal and affectionate relationships with people who are Jewish. So on a personal level, perhaps he’s not. But on a different, maybe thematic level, I think he probably is,” concluded Carlson, who blamed Buchanan for making it difficult to debate issues surrounding the U.S.-Israel relationship and immigration “because he gives people who watch him carefully the sense that he has another agenda that has to do with personal dislike, and that he believes in conspiracies, and that he believes that the Jews are this sinister, secretly organized force trying to affect American politics.”

There are a number of direct parallels to be drawn between the rhetoric Carlson deplored then and employs now.

While Carlson scoffed at Buchanan’s victim-complex  25 years ago, he recently indulged Candace Owens’s after she directed an anti-Semitic crack at her then-Daily Wire colleague Ben Shapiro. Shortly after the Owens dust-up, Carlson joined in the fracas, arguing that Shapiro’s concern for Israel in the wake of the October 7 terror attack has demonstrated that he “obviously” doesn’t “care about America.”

Most recently, Carlson laundered a version of the long-running blood libel that Jews systematically persecute Christians in an falsehood-laden interview with an anti-Israel Palestinian Christian activist who lauded the “strength of the Palestinian person” exhibited during the October 7 attack.

“If you wake up in the morning and decide that your Christian faith requires you to support a foreign government, blowing up churches and killing Christians. I think you’ve lost the thread,” asserted Carlson at the end of that interview.

While Carlson’s descent into conspiracy-mongering and outright bigotry over the years has been well-documented, nothing encapsulates the tragedy of his professional life as well as the dichotomy between Carlson’s condemnation of Buchanan’s worldview in 1999 and his adoption of it now.

The young writer who broke onto the national scene at a neoconservative magazine founded by two American Jews may have been smart enough to diagnose Buchanan’s faults, but he wasn’t strong enough to resist following him down the same dishonorable rabbit hole.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.