Talk show host Tucker Carlson on Oct. 27, 2024. Photo by Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images)
By Jacob Kornbluh
July 13, 2025
Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host and a leader in the Republican Party’s isolationist wing, said that Americans who previously served in the Israeli Defense Forces should have their U.S. citizenship revoked over concerns of dual loyalty. At the same time, he also criticized the Trump administration for trying to deport pro-Palestinian students who engaged in anti-Israel activity on campus.
“There are a lot of Americans who’ve served in the IDF — they should lose their citizenship,” Carlson said in a 45-minute speech on Saturday at the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit in Tampa, Florida. “You can’t fight for another country and remain an American, period.”
Carlson, who has promoted antisemitic tropes and has been associated with white nationalists, explained that his position is an “obvious recognition of the truth” and applies to all countries. He mocked his critics — “they just write you off as some sort of internet freak, hater, Nazi” — and said it is “fair to demand that the people running my country love it every bit as much as I do.”
The founder of the organization Carlson spoke to is Charlie Kirk, a conservative podcaster who has accused Jews of financing “anti-white causes.” Several Trump cabinet members and Republican officials attended and spoke at the three-day conference.
In a Q&A session after his remarks, Carlson also appeared to agree with an audience member that the Trump administration’s crackdown and deportation of pro-Palestinian students who engaged in anti-Israel activity is “totally outrageous.”
“You got 65 million people here illegally, according to the administration, and the only ones who are deported are ones who criticize a foreign country,” Carlson falsely claimed. “I don’t understand it. It’s driving people insane, actually, and it’s making people angry in a bad way.” The Trump administration has engaged in sweeping immigration raids in recent months. But Carlson only highlighted those arrested for their pro-Palestinian activities.
Carlson also devoted nearly half of his speech to a government memo, released last week, related to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal that has embroiled the administration and caused divisions within Trump’s base in recent days. Carlson claimed that Epstein, a disgraced Jewish financier accused of sex trafficking, was working for the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service.
“It’s extremely obvious to anyone who watches that this guy had direct connections to a foreign government,” Carlson said. “No one is allowed to say that that foreign government is Israel, because we have been somehow cowed into thinking that that’s naughty. There is nothing wrong with saying that. There is nothing hateful about saying that. There’s nothing antisemitic about saying. There’s nothing even anti-Israel about saying that.”
