Tucker Carlson published his third interview this year on X with a strident anti-Israel guest — this time the left-wing economist Jeffrey Sachs, who described the fall of the Assad regime in Syria as a plot by Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu.

Sachs claimed that the unexpected events of the past few weeks in Syria were the outcome of a 30-year plan by Netanyahu, whom he said was determined to destroy any government that favored the creation of a Palestinian state.

Sachs described the Assad regime as a “normal, functioning country” by the time the Arab Spring took place in 2011, ignoring the fact that Syria was already a totalitarian dictatorship that had murdered tens of thousands  of its own civilians. And he blamed the Israeli prime minister for creating Hamas and Hezbollah, two distinct Islamic terror groups that had both existed for many years by the time Netanyahu first took office for three years in 1996.

In an echo of antisemitic conspiracy theories of Jewish or “Zionist” control of American politics, Sachs made the claim that “Israel has driven so many American wars,” describing even the Obama administration as controlled by Israel.

Throughout, Carlson nodded in agreement, never challenging Sachs’s extraordinary assertions or asking that he provide evidence to back up his claims, many of which are flatly contradicted by common sense and available facts.

Sachs’s claims were an extension of what he has published on the events in Syria. In an article for the left-wing L.A. Progressive, Sachs claimed:

The fall of Syria this week is the culmination of the Israel-U.S. campaign against Syria that goes back to 1996 with Netanyahu’s arrival to office as Prime Minister. The Israel-U.S. war on Syria escalated in 2011 and 2012, when Barack Obama covertly tasked the CIA with the overthrow of the Syrian Government in Operation Timber Sycamore. That effort finally came to “fruition” this week, after more than 300,000 deaths in the Syrian war since 2011.

Sachs omitted the fact that the Assad regime had brutally oppressed the Syrian people for half a century; or that Sunni Muslims had their own sectarian reasons for resenting a minority Alawite regime backed by Shiite Iran; or that Turkey and other Sunni powers had long intervened in Syria on the side of rebel forces; or that Russia was the major global player in Syria until it decided to abandon Assad. To him, the U.S., driven by Netanyahu, was solely to blame.

Sachs, once a leading economist who advised post-communist Europe to adopt radical “shock therapy” to embrace capitalism, has since become a major figure on the left whose development efforts have been backed by George Soros.

During the 2024 campaign, Sachs broke with his former ally, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., over the latter’s support for Israel in the war Hamas began with the October 7 terror attack. (Kennedy has also been a guest on Carlson’s show.)

Carlson has long been a critic of the left, but it appears that Sachs’s virulent hostility to Israel attracted the host’s interest.

Carlson has also hosted other anti-Israel guests on his show, including a radical Christian cleric from Bethlehem who opposes the Abraham Accords; and a revisionist historian who minimized the Holocaust and claimed that Winston Churchill caused the Second World War because he, too, was put into power by shadowy “Zionists.”

The former Fox News host, once unfairly accused of antisemitism by groups like the Anti-Defamation League, seems to have embraced the role in which they cast him.

Widely seen as a victim of “cancel culture” who defied the corporate media to succeed on an independent platform, Carlson is a regular guest at President-elect Donald Trump’s estate at Mar-a-Lago, though he does not appear to have affected the incoming administration’s policy on the Middle East.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.