Pat Higgins

When I sat down with Tucker Carlson on Wednesday, I was expecting a thoughtful conversation and that he would ask questions and give me the opportunity to actually respond--just like he did with the little Nazi sympathizer Nick Fuentes or the guy who thought Hitler was the good guy and Churchill the bad guy. What I wasn't anticipating was a lengthy series of questions where he seemed to be insinuating that the Jews of today aren't really same people as the Jews of the Bible. I'll first just say something I didn't think to say to Tucker, which is that Ashkenazi Jews, meaning those who families had spent centuries in Europe, are a minority of Israel's Jewish population, only maybe 35-40%. There are far more Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews inside Israel. But there's a good reason, as it turns out, that I had never encountered this theory that Tucker kept pushing on. That’s because it comes from some of the darkest realms of the Internet and social media. I think it's important to take a moment now and educate Tucker and anyone else who might get sucked in by this dangerous conspiracy theory, just as I have been educated this week. I'm sharing this information because it has been weaponized by very bad people to delegitimize Jews and strip them of their history. It's an idea that gained traction in the 80's and 90's with David Duke and other Klansmen and neo-Nazis. It has really caught fire in recent years on the Internet and social media, mostly from some of the most overt anti-Semites and Jew haters you can find. I don’t know why Tucker was so fixated on this, and I'm certainly not saying he knew the origins of this conspiracy theory. I don't know what's in his heart or what he was thinking. But I do know that the discredited idea that most Ashkenazi or European Jews descended from the ancient Turkic kingdom of Khazaria is bunk. It's also been weaponized by people trying to deligitimize Jews, to strip them of their history, and to call them "imposters" or "fake Jews." This odious conspiracy theory is peddled by the likes of Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes and by people who love David Duke, as well as Islamist accounts that make up false smears about Israel non-stop and are run out of countries like Pakistan and Turkey. But we know from genetics and rich volumes of written literature that the Jews of today can trace their lineage back thousands of years to the Israel and the Jewish people of the Bible. They are as connected together as genetics tell us that the ancient Khazar kingdom is to people living today in Turkey. And if Tucker wants to tour more than Ben-Gurion Airport on his next trip to Israel, I'm happy to show him places where Jews have lived going back to the time of Jesus Christ and even earlier. I sincerely hope Tucker will let me know when he actually wants to learn facts about the land and people. Asking me about conspiracy theories should remain on the fringes and not be the heart of the conversation.