Ted Cruz 2.0: Tucker Carlson and Ambassador Mike Huckabee

Ambassador Mike Huckabee’s interview with Tucker Carlson was Ted Cruz 2.0. Mr. Huckabee, like Senator Cruz before him, probably agreed to speak with Mr. Carlson in hope that the discussion would expose the podcaster’s bad-faith agenda on Israel so decisively that it would bolster the pro-Israel case. That didn’t happen. Mr. Carlson did to the ambassador what he did to the Senator last year — he put him in the defendant’s box and discredited him so as to invalidate his testimony.Tucker Carlson got a lot wrong himself during the interview. He was wrong about the position of Christians in Israel, wrong about who the Jewish people are, and wrong about America’s relationship with Israel. He shrugged off facts that countered his narrative and lied about his communications with Israel’s most prominent conservative leader, Yoram Hazony, and about the nature of President Herzog’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Those are the social media clips the pro-Israel community is liking and sharing now to claim the “win”.However, fans of Mr. Carlson are sharing clips, too — those of Mr. Huckabee unable to define what a Jew is or what the borders of Israel should be. They are posting about Mr. Huckabee’s Biblical support for Israel expansionism and about who has sympathy for dead Gazan children. Even when the ambassador made good points, he did so clumsily and on his back heel. If there is a way to successfully respond to a battery of charges by someone as savvy as Mr. Carlson, Mr. Huckabee didn’t find it.Ultimately, the ambassador’s biggest problem was that he was the wrong man for the wrong job. One of Mr. Carlson’s first questions was about Mr. Huckabee’s meeting with Jonathan Pollard in the American Embassy in Jerusalem. Mr. Pollard had spent decades in prison in the U.S. for betraying his home country and delivering defense secrets to the Israeli government. He says he would do it again. Why, Mr. Carlson asked Mr. Huckabee, would the American ambassador to Israel welcome such a man into the American embassy for a meeting?There is no good answer to this question and the one Mr. Huckabee offered made a bad situation worse. That was the moment nothing else the ambassador said would really matter. Mr. Carlson had framed him as the American official who put Israel’s interests above America’s. The ambassador turned out to be an unreliable witness with a clear bias. It is the same tactic Mr. Carlson successfully used against Mr. Cruz during their interview in 2025, when Mr. Carlson recalled the senator’s assertion that he came to Congress with the “intention of being the leading defender of Israel”.Mr. Carlson and his fans feed off of moments like these and extrapolate from them sinister theories about a total Israeli capture of American foreign policy. It is a false claim, but one that, in fairness, the words and deeds of Messrs. Huckabee and Cruz help to keep alive. The pro-Israel camp can continue to post “Tucker got burned” clips to its online echo-chambers and self-soothe or it can consider that it may need a new strategy.Acknowledgment that in an honest effort to support Jews and the Jewish State from an endless onslaught of intentional delegitimization and vilification, some of the movement’s American spokespeople sometimes forget themselves is a start. Ambassador Huckabee should have met Tucker Carlson’s apology with one of his own and admitted that hosting Jonathan Pollard was wrong. One sentence to that effect would have altered the power dynamics of the rest of the interview.However, the most important lesson to be learned from the Huckabee v. Carlson match up comes from Harvard Professor Emerita and Tikvah Fund Senior Fellow, Ruth Wisse. It is a lesson she has been trying to teach Israel supporters for decades: get out of the defendant’s box.In an essay published in 2013 in Global Antisemitism: A Crisis of Modernity she wrote, “In politics as before the law, whoever stands in the dock is the defendant and whoever points the finger is the plaintiff. The only effective response to false accusation is effective counter-prosecution. Unless and until the defendant turns plaintiff, antisemitism enjoys the fun of negative campaigning.”Mr. Huckabee became the defendant the moment he agreed to the interview and he became a weak one the moment he failed the Pollard test. The question now is not who will take Tucker Carlson on next — it is when will someone sit Mr. Carlson down in the defendant’s box and point the finger at him?

Ted Cruz 2.0: Tucker Carlson and Ambassador Mike Huckabee

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