And the Anti-Israel Gold Rush

I have never been a Tucker Carlson fan. I’m not sure exactly what it is, but he always seemed like a phony to me, with that big cheesy smile that never reached his eyes and a degree in history from back when we thought the Russians were the enemy. I had him pegged as a failed CIA man with a chip on his shoulder, taking his petty grudges out on an unsuspecting public for an agenda he never announced. I pictured his pockets stuffed with Russian rubles just outside the camera’s view, and thick pile carpet on the floor to hush the sound of the coins rolling out of all that slick gabardine.

And lately I’ve been thinking about the change in one of his biggest positions — on Trump, on Israel, and more broadly on the Jewish people — and wondering how genuine any of it is.

For years he was one of Donald Trump’s loudest cheerleaders in American media. Then came October 7th, then the Iran war, and everything changed. These days he spends most of his airtime arguing that American foreign policy serves Israel instead of the United States, that Trump sucks, and that America is going down the tubes. That’s a sharp turn from cheerleader to jeerleader, and if I noticed it, everybody noticed it. I’ve been told I wouldn’t notice if my shoelaces were tied together, so when something flashes neon in my allegedly limited attention span, I figure it’s worth a look.

Carlson is now one of the biggest independent political broadcasters on earth, and he has the numbers to prove it. In March of this year his show came in at number seven on the American podcast rankings, with 34.1 million downloads in a single month. And he’s still climbing. But here’s the part you need to pay attention to. His podcast is currently ranked number one in Apple’s News Commentary category in Saudi Arabia, in the United Arab Emirates, and in Indonesia. And look where he’s been spending his time. He has toured Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, praising the region’s development and its rulers as he went, calling the UAE’s Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed a “wise leader unlike any other president I have met.” He sat down with the Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. And when he interviewed Qatar’s prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, the thing pulled six million views in a matter of hours. All Muslim countries.

And Carlson doesn’t only sell opinions. He co-owns ALP, the nicotine pouch company attached to his name, along with Turning Point Brands, and ALP is going global. It’s only the fourth or fifth biggest pouch brand in the United States with about two percent of the market, but it is growing fast and it is not thinking small. Reuters reported it launched in eleven European markets this summer. The stated goal is to be the number two pouch brand in the European Union by 2030, behind Zyn. That’s a real prize. The European market was worth about 1.7 billion dollars in 2024 and is forecast to clear 6 billion by 2031. And in May he signed Conor McGregor to front the international marketing.

So sure, let’s speculate with a tiny bit of bias. There are about two billion Muslims in the world. Carlson’s audience in Muslim-majority countries keeps growing while his commentary gets harsher toward Israel every day. And the harder he goes, the more of those two billion people he presumably reaches. Could that audience eventually be a market for pouches, subscriptions, books and whatever else the man decides to sell? Of course it could.

In 2026 I don’t picture rubles falling out of his pocket anymore. I picture the quiet trill of a crypto wallet, and a little birdie telling him what the next big move is in a region he spends a lot of time in, where beating up on Israel has never cost anybody an audience. I can’t prove a nickel of that. But I don’t think he’s chasing American ratings anymore. I think he’s chasing everybody else’s.

And before anybody decides this is a right-wing problem, it isn’t. The same thing is happening on the left. The Young Turks with Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian, Mehdi Hasan over at Zeteo and plenty of others are pounding Israel every single day, over and over, mercilessly, like it’s the only derision-worthy crisis on the planet, and you can bet they’re watching the same ratings numbers climb.

Carlson isn’t alone on his own side of the aisle either. Candace Owens and Megyn Kelly are doing the same thing, day after day, speaking and posting and broadcasting about Israel and very little else. Just Netanyahu’s war crimes and the Israeli army and the idea that a foreign country is running our government. They’re all over Trump too, though it’s hard to work up much sympathy for a man who sleeps through his own policy meetings. I’m not saying Trump needs defending. I’m saying Israel has become the new big baddie, and I think the motive is financial, not political.

Now, I can’t see inside anybody’s head, and I can’t prove that money is what turned any of these people around. But the incentive is sitting right there in the untapped Muslim market, and people respond to incentives. They always have. The simplest explanation is that they’ve stopped worrying about ratings in America and started going after market share among two billion adherents of Islam. And remember that Apple News Commentary chart in Saudi Arabia, the one Tucker Carlson sits on top of? Megyn Kelly is number three on it, and Mehdi Hasan’s show is number five. Coincidence, I’m sure.

So here’s what I think is actually going on. Maybe the story isn’t Tucker Carlson at all. Maybe it’s just greed, in a business that was never really about facts so much as market share and sales.

For most of American media history, an American political commentator needed Americans. Walter Cronkite needed American viewers, Rush Limbaugh needed American listeners, Fox and CNN and MSNBC needed American cable subscribers and American advertisers. Their money and their country were tied together, and nobody ever had to think about it, because there was no other option.

That’s over!!

Today a guy in a studio can press a button and reach Jakarta, Cairo, Riyadh, London and Lagos instantly. Those new viewers watch the ads, drive the numbers, share the clips and buy the products, exactly like Americans do. And capitalism does what capitalism always does: it follows the customer. The difference is that the customer no longer has to be American.

Picture it. You spend an hour on some dull American policy issue and get 50,000 views. The next day you spend an hour railing against Israel and American foreign policy and get 5,000,000, because it resonates with a foreign audience. And some of those new people subscribe, and some of those subscribers start buying whatever you’re selling. Capitalism doesn’t require a conspiracy — it only requires a customer.

And listen, I don’t think this is treason. Let’s be clear about that. In this country we have an enormously broad right to criticize our own government, and that right has to cover arguments other Americans find offensive, or even anti-American. Even saying inflammatory things on purpose because foreigners will pay attention isn’t a crime. It’s the First Amendment doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.

I don’t like watching the First Amendment protect a sales pitch disguised as political conviction, and I don’t think it’s going to fare well for us down the road. But it isn’t a legal problem, at least not yet. It’s an economic problem and a cultural one, and I’d argue that’s a bigger deal than we can even imagine, because it makes you start to wonder what the First Amendment was actually built to protect. Free speech? Yes. All day long. Smarmy televangelism aimed at riyals, dirhams and rupiah? Now I’m not so sure. And once you start doubting the thing itself, you’ve got a problem whose proportions are ugly and dangerous. That really, really worries me.

How will Americans respond to commentators picking up opinions specifically to generate foreign sales? Do we want our next big export to be anti-Western opinion with a product endorsement stapled to it, enriching a handful of podcast personalities? I don’t think we do.

Will the government step in and make it illegal before we get to the point where American journalists trash America because it pays in dollars, riyals or crypto? And which branch would we even expect to do it?

So are we doomed? Last year Gallup found that 45 percent of Americans now call themselves independents, the highest number it has ever recorded, beating the old high of 43 percent from 2014. Republicans and Democrats came in tied at 27 percent each. Among Gen Z it’s 56 percent. And a research outfit called More in Common surveyed 8,000 Americans and found that two-thirds of us belong to what they called the exhausted majority. That is the biggest unserved audience in American politics, and it’s full of people who are sick of the fighting and would rather just make life better for everybody.

And here’s the part that got my attention. More in Common ran the same kind of research across Europe — France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands — and found the same thing. Quiet, worn-out majorities who don’t recognize themselves in any of the shouting that carpet-bombs the airwaves like little opinion drone swarms.

I have to imagine it’s true in most countries nobody has bothered to poll. The exhausted centrist is quite the untapped market. Imagine if somebody could find it. I don’t think those people are listening to Tucker Carlson, and I don’t think they’re listening to Cenk Uygur either. I just hope it doesn’t take a catastrophe to wake the disengaged majority up.

But I don’t think the disenchanted middle is just an American thing. Hopefully it’s everywhere. Most people just want to go to work, pay their bills, take care of their families and find some time to have a little fun before the sun comes up.

Which means maybe this works both ways. If a guy in a studio with a crypto wallet falling out of an expensive suit can reach two billion people by getting angrier every day, then maybe a reasonable, fact-based reporter can reach the exhausted two-thirds in twenty countries who checked out of the screaming match a long time ago. Nobody has really tried to reach the rational middle. Not successfully, anyway. That’s the opportunity — waiting for somebody with a smile that actually reaches their eyes, explaining facts they believe because they’re true and not because they’re convenient.

Anybody got any ideas?