Tucker Carlson calls for third party, assails Israel support: ‘I officially don’t care about Hamas’

American podcaster Tucker Carlson declares his intention to “help build a third party,” invoking US support for Israel as an example of purported indifference to Americans’ problems.

“I’m going to help build a third party. There should be a good-faith effort to figure out what benefits the country,” he tells the Columbia Journalism Review. “‘What about Hamas?’ I officially don’t care about Hamas. The US government should have, as its first priority, the welfare of its own people.”

Carlson accuses the two main parties of acting in “lockstep” on matters of “war and finance,” arguing: “if you vote for Trump and you still wind up in a regime-change war…then we need options.” But he says he does not want to be a candidate himself.

Additionally, Carlson additionally claims that “Chuck Schumer is strongly behind Trump’s foreign policy.”

Schumer, the Democrats’ leader in the Senate, was crucial in passing former president Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear accord with Iran, which Trump assailed and withdrew from in his first term. He is also the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in US history.

Schumer has criticized the US-Israeli war with Iran since its start, and he has brought ten different resolutions to a vote seeking to check Trump’s authority to wage it. Last he month called the US-Iran memorandum of understanding “the art of the disaster.”

In the interview, Carlson says he is “not an antisemite,” adding: “If I was an antisemite, I would just say so: ‘I’m against the Jews, here’s why.'”

Though Carlson explicitly denounces outright hatred, he has been widely accused of antisemitism over frequent assertions that Israel is pulling the strings of US foreign policy, as well as conspiracy theories, including that the Chabad Hasidic movement was behind the war with Iran.