Law, Power, and Justice

www.nytimes.com/2026/04/24/opinion/conspiracy-theory-tucker-antisemitism.html

I’m all for embracing converts to the anti-Trump cause. But if you listen to the dialogue between Tucker and his brother, it’s clear that rather than honestly reckoning with their role in America’s derangement, they’re developing a new conspiracy theory to explain it away.

Trump, they strongly imply, has been compromised — maybe even blackmailed and physically threatened — by Zionist or globalist forces seeking the deliberate destruction of the United States. On Tucker’s podcast, Buckley described a systematic undermining of America through the George Floyd protests, mass migration and now the war with Iran.

“It can’t be a confluence of random events,” Buckley said. “It is clearly by design. It’s clearly been a long-term plan.”

As former Secretary of State John Kerry has said, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel tried to persuade previous American presidents to strike the Islamic republic, but only Trump was vain and gullible enough to agree. America’s hand-in-glove relationship with Israel has become a liability, and we should end it.

But it wasn’t Israel or Zionist donors or some shadowy internationalist cabal that made Trump a buffoonish maniac who glories in threats of violence. If the second Trump administration is worse than the first, it’s largely because the establishment figures once demonized by Carlson as deep-state subversives are all gone. Trump is who he always was. He’s just more politically unfettered than before.