Tucker Carlson takes Ron DeSantis to task for ‘foreign policy stuff’ and antisemitism legislation

Just a few short years ago, Gov. Ron DeSantis often went on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News to make news.

But more recently, the politician and the commentator couldn’t be farther apart, as evidenced by Carlson’s recent interview with gubernatorial candidate James Fishback.

Carlson said he was “out” on the man who previously was a featured guest in the A-Block of his prime time show for his shifting positions on the Ukraine War and his signing of a bill that protected people, including Jews, from being harassed for wearing traditional clothes, from having images projected on their buildings, from having trash dumped on their property, and from being harassed at schools or while sitting Shiva.

“I always admired DeSantis certainly during COVID. I thought he was just a remarkable leader, interviewed him many times. I know him and his wife. And it was the foreign policy stuff that made me wonder, like, what is this and how controlled is he by Ken Griffin and the rest of his donors? And then he had this moment where he signed a hate speech law out of the country. He flew to a foreign country, Israel to sign a hate speech law for Florida. And I thought, well, this is obviously unconstitutional. It’s immoral, but it’s also part of an elaborate humiliation ritual where you have to go not just like enslave your own people with a hate speech law, which that is slavery.”

Carlson had previously said Griffin “told (DeSantis) to change his view on Ukraine from ‘It’s a regional conflict we shouldn’t get involved in’ to ‘It’s a super important thing. We should send more money.’”

DeSantis originally deemed the war a “territorial dispute” and not one of America’s “vital national interests” in a statement provided to Tucker Carlson, in a seeming effort to curry favor with the now-former Fox News host.

He soon enough walked that position back, telling Piers Morgan “it wasn’t that I thought Russia had a right to that, and so if I should have made that more clear, I could have done it.”

He would go on from there to call for a “settlement” in the war, before a spirited exchange in July with Carlson in Iowa at the Family Leadership Summit.

DeSantis took issue with Carlson saying he changed his position from telling Carlson that the Russian invasion was a simple “territorial dispute,” rejecting Carlson’s restatement of DeSantis’ position as changing his view “to describe Putin as a war criminal and say that it was central to America’s foreign policy.”

DeSantis has responded to Carlson’s “bizarre” attacks on him as a “pure puppet … totally a marionette of his donors,” calling him irrelevant and saying that when Carlson “lost the Fox show, (DeSantis) kind of lost track of what he was doing.”