Victor Davis Hanson Warns Tucker, MTG Could Play 2028 Spoiler for Dems – Both Driven by 'Anti-Semitic Rage'
Any third-party effort in modern American politics is a suicide pact in which only one side agrees to the mutual demise, if it’s successful.
With the exception of one governorship gleaned from Ross Perot’s Reform Party — Jesse “The Body/The Brain” Ventura’s single term as Minnesota’s chief executive — no third party has found any sustained success since the Populist Party of the late 19th century.
Most, if not all, of the short-lived third-party runs were designed not to win but to throw presidential elections into chaos, usually for very specific grievances and not holistic platforms. George Wallace’s American Independent Party, which sought to deny the Democrats the presidency in 1968 under the pretense that it no longer hated blacks enough, is the beau ideal of what a modern third-party movement looks like.
It’s therefore worth paying close attention when Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and other MAGA defectors who seem to have a curious preoccupation with the one Jewish state on the entire planet plan to launch their own party. Conservative historian Victor Davis Hanson is paying attention, and he says what he’s seen “would suggest that all they want to do is make sure that Donald Trump’s successor, J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio, loses the 2028 election.”
In case you’ve been wondering what Carlson has been up to in between battling demon attacks and hawking nicotine pouches, Carlson has been looking into creating a third party for 2028. The thought originally popped up during a July interview with the Columbia Journalism Review — and like a lot of Tucker’s pronouncements, it fell under the “big if true” umbrella.
That said, at the beginning of this month it emerged that he hosted a roundtable at his cosplay cabin in Maine of so-called “MAGA dissidents” — former Rep. Greene, current lame-duck Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, former intelligence officer Joe Kent, and others.
We said no more foreign wars and we meant it and supported Donald Trump because he made that promise.
But he’s betrayed us all.
Our commitment is America First for all Americans, right, left, and center.
The movement has begun. pic.twitter.com/mZXadw0kBr— Former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@FmrRepMTG) August 1, 2026
Then, on his Aug. 5 podcast, he laid out a 10-point agenda for the new party. According to Axios, it would be “fair, sovereign, productive, beautiful, healthy, honest, optimistic, wise, decent, and united.”
That’s breaking some new ground for politicians. For 250 years now, our officials have been running on being unfair, lazy, ugly, unhealthy, dishonest, and indecent. But now, Tucker Carlson is here to change all of that. Fit the man for a Superman cape already.
In a podcast last week, Hanson noted the suicidal and vague notion of this plan, and suggested it had one real unifying cause: anti-Semitism.
Hanson of course pointed out the examples of third-party candidates doing nothing but acting as spoilers — Teddy Roosevelt in 1912, Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996, Ralph Nader in 2000 — but he thought there was a more salient question: “What is their agenda?”
“Well, they’ve said that they have 10 points if they really are going to form a third party,” Hanson said. “I looked at them. I could say confidently that 80 percent, eight out of 10, are what they’re getting right now with Donald Trump.”
“They’re worried about a porous border. They’re worried about crime. They’re worried about DEI. They’re worried about the family. They’re worried about all of these things,” he continued. “But who’s giving them relief? Who’s offering a remedy to their anxieties? Donald Trump is. Do they really think the left has a better idea that will better fit their agenda on the border that saw 12 million people come in under Biden, or defund the police, or the DEI chauvinism that came in under the Democrats?”
The issues on which they differ are the important ones. First, the idea that “decency” requires us to not only stop military action abroad but to pay reparations to noncombatants. (“You can imagine how that would work in the real world,” Hanson noted, with no small amount of sarcasm.)
But then, the point of being “sovereign,” which means something very specific to this very small coterie of people: “They felt that the Israeli government was conducting undue influence in the United States and, by association, I think you can read between the lines, the Jewish lobby.”
“All of them have gone after [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee]. But that’s not just the end of it,” Hanson said, before noting who Carlson was putting on his show.
“They have said things, and they have had hosts or people with views like Darryl Cooper, who really blamed World War II — the U.S. intervention into World War II — on Jewish influence, and has downplayed the deaths of Jews in World War II in various subtle ways, but nonetheless, he has,” Hanson said. “And Nick Fuentes, who makes no apologies, is forthright and candid that he’s very critical of Jewish people in general, and their support of Israel is secondary to that. He feels Jews don’t represent the Christian tradition, that they have too much money, and they’re too vocal, and we know the whole story.”
“There is an element of anti-Israelism and anti-Semitic anger that also fuels it,” he concluded. “It’s not going to go anywhere, but it may, as it’s designed, as spoilers, try to hurt someone that they once and very recently assured us was essential to the United States.”
And yes, sadly, that’s all that this is: Forcing the Republican Party to adopt the same fashionable and rabid anti-Israeli sentiment that the left has, or lose power. It’s a hostage situation, and Carlson should know it. If he doesn’t, that just means he’s too far gone to be at the helm of any third-party movement.
One does not wish to throw around the label of anti-Semitism lightly, but what are we to say when Carlson seems to obsess over the one Jewish nation in the world and invite open anti-Semites on for friendly interviews?
In the case of Thomas Massie, also obsessed with Israel, what are we to assume when he said, at the start of his concession speech after losing his primary that “I would’ve come out sooner, but I had to call my opponent and concede, and it took a while to find Ed Gallrein in Tel Aviv”?
And as for Greene, the benefit of the doubt was once extended to her in regard to those “Jewish space lasers.” One look at her social media accounts now and you’ll quickly realize that benefit can no longer be extended.
The reason the motive matters is because when a third-party suicide pact is entered into, there must be a compelling reason for it, or at least a reason that compels it.
Hanson gets it right: Almost everything Carlson says he and his confederates want is being delivered by a Trump administration and would be delivered most effectively through the Republican Party in the future.
If Carlson really believed these points were tenable, he could work within that structure to enact change. It shouldn’t be difficult if the ask is small: No foreign misadventures, American sovereignty above all.
He knows that’s not the small ask he wants, he knows he can’t get the big ask, and he believes the next best thing is aiding the enemy out of spite. As a waste of political and tangible capital, this gambit would be hard to beat, and it bears asking — repeatedly and with great specificity — what would cause someone to undertake such a hopeless cause.
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