Opinion - Michelle Goldberg
April 24, 2026
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.”
After World War I, when Germany humiliated itself in a war that it started, right-wing populists embraced the dolchstoßlegende, or stab-in-the-back myth, blaming Jews for their country’s defeat. Now, as the American right contemplates the entirely foreseeable catastrophe that an unbridled Trump has visited on America, some are creating a new stab-in-the-back myth about Zionism to make sense of it.
“Tucker Carlson is an idiot and no one should ever listen to anything he has to say” is an entirely consistent position that will basically always work.
Also can replace “Tucker Carlson” here with any Conservative talking head / “thought leader” “intellectual”