Political Pistachio

By Douglas V. Gibbs

I want to begin with a confession about something that has cost me more than it should have.

Over the last two years I have lost friends.  Not to death, not to distance, not to the ordinary attrition of middle age.  I lost them to a subject. And the subject was Israel.

These were not political opponents.  These were men and women I had shared meals with, prayed with, discussed politics with about tariffs and school boards and whether the Raiders or Anaheim Angels would ever be relevant again.  And then, somewhere in the middle of a war that began on October 7, 2023, something in them turned over.  They became, and this is the only word for it, obsessed.  Every conversation eventually curved toward it.  Every silence got filled with a new video, a new thread, a new podcast clip, or a new book they found.  And when I pushed back, gently, with a verse or a statistic, the temperature rose and did not come back down.

I am told this is a normal evolution of our society.  I am told the country is realigning.  I am told the truth in America is post-Israel, that the non-leftist base has moved into a direction similar to their political opponents, and that the old Reagan-era catechism is over.  

They argue against their version of dispensationalism, they’ve reworked biblical understanding, and have kicked the story of Israel square in the gut.  As I watch what is going on, here is what I keep coming back to: the new anti-Israel position is not merely wrong.  It is unwarranted.  It is not that the critics have weighed the evidence and reached a different conclusion.  It is that a great many of them never weighed anything at all.  They absorbed a mood, adopted its vocabulary, and then defended the vocabulary with the ferocity of people defending a conclusion they never actually did the work to reach – or manipulated the facts to reach.

Antisemitism has always had an aesthetic.  What is new is that it now has a talking-point sheet, and the talking points don’t survive contact with the data.

Let me clear the ground.  Criticism of Israel is not antisemitism.  Israel has a leftist problem, a deep state, a Supreme Court that runs roughshod, and politicians who make bad decisions – just like we do.  I have written about all of it.  

But there is a ladder here, and it has three rungs.  Most people climb it without noticing.

The first rung is ordinary criticism: this policy or that policy was poorly executed.  Fine.  The second rung is the moral inversion: Israel is uniquely, structurally, culpably bad – worse than its enemies, worse than anybody.  Now we’re in contested territory, but it’s still a debate.  The third rung is the one where people stop arguing and start reciting: it is their decision, their faulty reasoning, that there is something wrong with the Jews.

The tell that a person has reached the third rung is not the volume of their criticism.  It’s the proportionality of their attention.

I once cheered for Tucker Carlson.  Not casually.  Genuinely.  When he was doing the work at Fox, he was one of the few men on television willing to say the things that needed saying about the administrative state, the border, and the hollowing out of the middle class.  He was funny.  He was fearless.  He was, at his best, a good journalist.

Then something happened.

I want to be fair to him, so let me start with what he gets right.  He is correct that the United States should be able to ask what it gets for the money it sends abroad.  He is correct to wave red flags in the air when war emerges in the Middle East, and the United States gets involved in it.  He is correct that the Iraq War deserves a hard second look.  These are legitimate questions.

But watch what he does with them.

On Amalek (the grandson of Esau, and a symbol of pure-unprovoked and irrational hatred against Israel), he told millions of listeners that Netanyahu “called for total genocide” of the Palestinians.  “The kids too.”  What Netanyahu actually said was this: “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible.  And we do remember.”  That’s it.  That’s the whole quotation.

Amalek is not a body count.  Amalek is an archetype.  The enemy who strikes the stragglers, the weak, the rear guard.  Deuteronomy commands Israel to remember.  Netanyahu invoked a memory, and Carlson heard a quota.  And then he ran with it for two years.

He has claimed Israel is “the most violent country in the world by far per capita.”  He has claimed Israel had foreknowledge of 9/11 and hid it.  He has resurrected the USS Liberty, an incident both governments investigated and concluded was mistaken identity, as though it were settled treachery.  He has said Trump is a “hostage” to Netanyahu and described the relationship as “slavery.”  He has said modern Jews have no real link to the Jews of the Bible, which is the Khazar myth wearing a nicer jacket.  He has claimed Israel wants to “destroy Europe” by generating refugee flows.  And he has told his audience that Israel is not a democracy “in any sense,” which would come as a surprise to the Arab parties in the Knesset, the Arab justice on the Supreme Court, and the Arab MKs who have served in coalition.

There is a pattern in all of it.  Each claim is individually checkable.  Each has been checked.  And each one lands on the same conclusion: Israel is not a normal country having a hard war.  Israel is a mechanism: something that operates on the world rather than in it.

Then, in May of this year, Carlson sat down with Israel’s Channel 13 and did something remarkable.  Confronted with his own use of the word, he shrugged it off:

“Israel has murdered all these children, thousands of children in Gaza.  But the real criminal is me because I describe that as genocide.  Ok, it’s not genocide.  It’s killing innocents.  It’s wrong.  You can call it genocide or ethnic cleansing.  You can call it a crime, a sin, an atrocity.  I don’t really care.”

Read that again.  It’s not genocide.  He said it out loud, to an Israeli interviewer, on the record.

And then he went back to the show and kept saying genocide.

Then, the data showed up. 

On October 2, the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health, the same ministry that has fed Carlson his numbers from the beginning, released its 2025 annual mortality report.  For the first time since the war started, it broke out all deaths, not just the violent ones.

Here is what its own figures say.

Of 24,650 total deaths in Gaza in 2025, 5,780 were non-violent.  That is fewer non-violent deaths than Gaza recorded in 2022 – 6,061 – a year with no war at all.  The crude death rate was 11.59 per thousand.  Gaza’s population grew by 1.2 percent in 2025, faster than most countries on earth.  Births are running at roughly 6,000 a month against a few hundred deaths – a ratio of about twelve to one.

Twelve births for every death, and we are told a people is being exterminated.

The Genocide Convention itself lists “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group” as an act of genocide.  Israel is not doing that.  Israel is, by the Health Ministry’s own ledger, presiding over one of the fastest-growing populations in the world.

And the age distribution destroys the other half of the narrative.  The pre-war male-to-female mortality ratio in Gaza was 1.12 to 1.  In 2025 it was 2.75 to 1.  Deaths among military-aged males ran 4.9 times the deaths among females of the same age.  That is what war looks like.  The fighting-age cohort absorbing the blows.  It is not what indiscriminate extermination looks like, which would skew toward the defenseless and the very young.  The endlessly repeated claim that 70 percent of the dead are women and children is contradicted by the ministry’s own published tables, and has been since early 2024.

The famine claim collapsed in the same document.  The IPC famine threshold requires roughly two deaths per ten thousand per day.  Applied to the Gaza Governorate alone during the alleged famine window, that works out to about 8,600 indirect deaths in 46 days.  Gaza’s entire recorded non-violent death toll for the whole of 2025, across the whole Strip, for all twelve months, was 5,780.  Malnutrition and metabolic disorders accounted for about 173 deaths, many with pre-existing conditions.  UNICEF’s own measurements in July found malnutrition in Gaza below pre-war levels; lower than in Egypt and lower than in Morocco.

None of this is ideological.  None of it is a think-tank product.  It is the hostile witness, testifying against its own brief, in its own handwriting.

Kevin McCullough put it plainly in his open letter to Carlson: no genocide occurred, and anyone still saying so after these reports is lying.  I think that’s right.  But I’d put a finer point on it.  The honest man’s error is excusable.  The dishonest man’s repetition, after the data lands, is a choice.

Another person I used to defend and enjoyed was Candace Owens.  Sharp, funny, unafraid, genuinely good at puncturing pretension.  Then she went somewhere.

She called Israel a “demonic state.”  She called it a “cult nation.”  She has claimed the Mossad killed JFK.  She has claimed Jeffrey Epstein was an Israeli spy.  She has said, in a post that reached 2.8 million people, that “we are ruled by satanic pedophiles who work for Israel,” and closed with the phrase that has become her signature: “This is the synagogue of Satan.”

That phrase is a specific theological claim, drawn from Revelation 2:9 and 3:9.  “The synagogue of Satan.”  And it is a claim with teeth.  It says that the Jews who reject Christ are not merely outside the covenant but are a counterfeit of it.  A fake synagogue.  A satanic stand-in.

And here is what makes her case fascinating to me.

Candace Owens converted to Catholicism.  She entered the one branch of the Christian faith that formally, in writing, in 1965, repudiated replacement theology.  Nostra Aetate declared that the Jews remain most dear to God, that the Church draws sustenance from the root of the good olive tree onto which she has been grafted, and that the covenant with Israel was never revoked.  Vatican II did the work.  Rome settled it.  The Catechism codified it in paragraph 839.

So she converted into a tradition that had already answered her argument, and then proceeded to argue as though it hadn’t.

That is the shape of the whole phenomenon.  It is not that these people lack a tradition.  It is that they have not read their own.

Dennis Prager wrote her a fifteen-page letter in September 2024, methodically taking apart her claims about Jews, Zionism, and Israel, point by point, in public, and invited her to respond.  She never really did.  In January he went further, warning that her rhetoric revives the old hatred and teaches her audience to see Jews as a manipulative force running America and the world.  Two years on, the fifteen pages still stand unanswered.  Because you cannot answer them without conceding them.

Why do smart people fall for this?

This is the part that actually matters, because the names at the top are symptoms, not causes. Something in the ecosystem is producing this, and until we name it, we’ll just keep growing more Carlsons.

One: Replacement theology is the substrate.  This is where I part company with the purely political explanations.  The political argument has no floor without the theological one underneath it.  If the Church is the new Israel, then the Jews are a redundant people, and a redundant people in possession of a contested piece of real estate is not a covenant, it’s an inconvenience.  Every one of the “facts” I listed above can be checked in ten minutes by anyone with a search engine.  So why doesn’t it stick?  Because the conclusion is already in place before the evidence arrives.  The conclusion is theological.  The evidence is just being recruited to defend it.

Two: audience capture, or the contrarian treadmill.  Carlson built an identity on telling his audience what the establishment wouldn’t.  That is a good instinct and a good business.  But it is a treadmill, and the treadmill only turns one way.  Once “the establishment is pro-Israel” became true, “therefore Israel is suspect” became structurally necessary.  He can’t stop now.  Stopping would require him to agree with the people he has built a career on disagreeing with.  That is a much harder thing than changing your mind.

Three: the funding question, which is real but oversold.  McCullough’s opening jab that Carlson may be paid by “middle eastern antisemitic propagandists” has become a cottage industry.  There are FARA filings involving Qatar-linked lobbying firms.  TCN denies ever taking a penny from any foreign government, and no direct payment to Carlson has been documented.  So the honest version is this: the Gulf has bought a great deal of influence in Washington, Israel’s rivals have a vested interest in a post-Israel American political community, and Carlson has become the single most valuable asset in that project – whether or not the checks are in his name.

Four: isolationism reduced to a slogan.  “America First” is a good idea, but we have to be careful that it doesn’t decay into “America only.”  If that is the game, then every ally becomes a leech and every commitment becomes a trap.  Israel just happens to be the smallest ally, the most dependent one, and the one with the loudest domestic lobby which makes it the easiest to cast as the parasite.  Note that the same people rarely apply the identical ledger to NATO, to South Korea, or to the Gulf states that are actually paying for the influence.

Five: the algorithm rewards heat.  A genocide is a better story than a mortality table.  “Twelve births for every death” is not a headline.  “They’re killing the children” is.  The medium selects for the more extreme version of every story, and then the audience, having been formed by the medium, demands the more extreme version.  Two years of that and you have people who genuinely believe they have studied the question.

I said earlier that the proportionality of attention is the tell.  Let me put numbers on it.

A study by the Jewish People Policy Institute found that Carlson mentions Israel more than every other country on earth combined.  One analysis put Israel and Iran together at more than a quarter of all spoken words across a sample of his broadcasts.  One in six words.  Out of a hundred and ninety-five countries.

Set that against the world.  Sudan’s civil war has displaced fourteen million people.  Russia’s war in Ukraine has produced casualties in the millions.  China holds over a million Uyghurs.  Islamist militants have put five million Nigerian Christians into refugee camps and have engaged in a murderous rampage that could be compared to genocide.  Christian persecution, mind you, that a Christian broadcaster might reasonably be expected to cover nightly.

Nobody is on fire about any of it.  Not at that volume.  Not with that stamina.

This is the PJ Media line and it’s the right one: no Jews, no news.  If a person’s moral outrage is calibrated to the actual scale of human suffering, Israel shouldn’t be anywhere near the top of the list of stories in their ranking.  If it is first, and stays first, and everything else is a footnote, they aren’t doing analysis.  They’re doing something else.

For the friends who are still reachable, here is the short version of the catalogue, because in my experience the arguments are recycled and there are only about eight of them.

“Israel is a settler-colonial state.”  Then the colonizers are the indigenes.  They are the only people in recorded history to return to their ancestral homeland speaking their ancestral language and praying toward it three times a day.  There has been a continuous Jewish presence in that land for three thousand years, and it never fully emptied, not under Rome, not under the Crusaders, not under the Ottomans, not under the British.

“There was no Israel before 1948.”  There was no state of Israel before 1948, just as there was no state of Italy before 1861.  Nobody says Italy was invented.  The people, the language, the land, the liturgy, and the longing all predate the passport.

“Jesus was a Palestinian.”  He was a Judean Jew.  “Palestine” is a Roman administrative renaming (Syria Palaestina), imposed by Hadrian after 135 AD, deliberately, to scrub Judaea off the map.  Which means the name itself is a Roman attempt at replacement theology.  It worked better than anyone expected.

“The Jews are Khazars, converts with no blood claim.”  There was a Khazar conversion, and it was real.  It was also a rounding error next to the genetic evidence.  Ashkenazi Jews cluster with other Jewish populations and with Levantine populations, not with the Caucasus.

“AIPAC controls Congress.”  AIPAC is a lobby.  So is the NRA, so is the AMA, so is the Chamber of Commerce.  The difference is that AIPAC’s lobby is treated as sinister while everybody else’s is treated as normal politics.

“The USS Liberty.”  Both governments concluded the whole thing was a mistake.  But, due to the mystery that exists, it remains a fair question.  But notice how it’s deployed: not as a question, as a verdict.  And even if you were able to show me irrefutable evidence, it shouldn’t indict an entire people.  Segments of groups often do evil things.  It’s a reality.  The Nazis didn’t represent the entire German people, and the Deep State does not represent every American.

“Genocide.”  Twelve to one.  Fewer non-violent deaths than 2022.  Population growth.  See above.

“From the river to the sea.”  This one is the funniest, because both sides say it and mean opposite things.  When Israel’s critics chant it, it means one state with a Palestinian majority.  When Israel’s defenders say it, it means the land between the Jordan and the sea is ours.  And there is a reason the chant works better for the critics: it’s a slogan of replacement, and replacement is what has momentum.

I don’t have a clean answer for everyone who is not willing to listen.  I’ve lost some of these relationships and I don’t expect them back.  But I’ve learned a few things worth passing on.

Don’t argue the conclusion.  Argue the arithmetic.  “Israel is committing genocide” is a conclusion and conclusions are defended emotionally.  “How many people died in Gaza in 2025, and how many were born?” is a fact and facts have to be looked up.  Most people can’t do it.  That silence is more persuasive than any speech you can make.

Use their source.  Don’t cite Israeli figures.  Cite the Gaza Ministry of Health.  When the hostile witness agrees with you, the argument is over, and the only move left is to attack the witness – which is itself a concession, because they’ve been quoting him for two years.

Concede the real things.  Israel does have a leftist judiciary and a bad coalition and sometimes makes seemingly bad decisions that makes no sense to anyone who has never lived there.  If you pretend Israel does no wrong, you confirm their model of you as a shill.  Concede, then hold the line where the line actually is.

Accept that some of them are gone.  There is a point past which a person is not persuadable because the position has become an identity.  You can’t debate someone out of an identity.  You can only wait, and be gracious when the data finally gets to them, and not say “I told you so” too loudly when it does.

And understand the thing that makes this different from a normal policy disagreement: it is a spiritual fight wearing political clothes.  The Devil has always gone after what God has set His affection on, and God has set His affection on that strip of land and that stubborn people.  The intensity is not proportionate to the size of the country because the fight isn’t about the size of the country.

The covenant doesn’t move.

I have made the theological case at length repeatedly on this wesbsite, so I’ll be brief here.  Genesis 12 is unconditional.  God did not ask Abraham to earn it; He swore it on His own character.  The land boundaries in Genesis 15 are surveyed in real dirt.  Romans 11 asks the question outright: did God reject His people?  It answers by no means, and then says the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable.  The branches were broken off for unbelief and can be grafted back in, and they will be.  God’s plan for Israel is still unfolding.

Israel’s current unbelief doesn’t void the covenant.  It’s the same reason a father doesn’t stop loving a disobedient son.  And the return in 1948, in unbelief, is exactly the pattern the prophets described: a regathering before a revival.  As J. Vernon McGee observed, they came back without peace, and that itself is the fingerprint of God’s hand rather than man’s.

So here is where I land, and I’ll say it without hedging.

The antisemitism rising in America, on both sides of the political spectrum, is unacceptable because it is a betrayal of our own foundations – the Hebraic roots of the Republic, the covenant theology of the church, the plain reading of Scripture.  But it is unwarranted because it is also, simply, factually lazy.  The claims are checkable.  They have been checked.  They have been found wanting.  And the people making them have not done the work, and know it, and are hoping you won’t either.

Tucker said it out loud once, to an Israeli, on the record: it’s not genocide.  He was right that day.  The data has since made him righter than he wanted to be.

The least he owes the audience that trusted him is to say it again, in his own studio, without a hostile interviewer in the room.

And the least the rest of us owe is to keep the receipts.

— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary