Charlie Kirk Was Right. Our Leaders Ignored Him.

Tucker Carlson (0:01)

Today is October 7th, 2026 It's the third anniversary of the most horrifying, certainly the most widely publicized attack on mainland Israel in its history. Three years ago today, of course you remember, forces of Hamas, the militant group, also the, at the time, government of Gaza, the Israeli controlled, semi-technically independent area south of Israel, taken by the Israeli government in 1967, and run ever since.

Fighters from Hamas rolled over the border into southern Israel, into famously a music festival, into a kibbutz, several, and began killing people and taking hostages. 1200 people were killed, the majority of them civilians, a lot of them at that music festival. And the world was horrified by this, instantly horrified by it, because it was obviously horrifying. The majority of people killed, to repeat, were civilians. They were not IDF soldiers, they were just Israelis. And a lot of them were women and young people, and they were killed. And people across the world, even people who aren't generally on Israel's side, paused to acknowledge, all good people did, that this is awful. There's no excuse for this. And that no one can ever defend the murder of civilians at any time, at any place.

And so, that was the reaction, the gut reaction of most people. Certainly, my reaction, certainly, everyone watching this, probably felt exactly the same way. What only a few people understood immediately were two things. One, this is pretty weird that this could happen. What was this? And two, this is the beginning of a change, not just in Israel or in Gaza, though it was both of those, but in the world and not just the Middle East, that this event was likely to set off a chain reaction of events that would change the world that you live in no matter where you live. And so far over the last three years, that has proven true. That attack has given way directly to at least six separate conflicts in five different countries, wars in which many hundreds of thousands of people have been killed. And there's no sign that those conflicts are ending anytime soon. In fact, as we speak, they are accelerating, and they're becoming, well, we don't know what they're becoming, but they are reshaping the world. So as our descendants look back on this time, they will see, we believe, October 7th very much like they see 9-11 or Pearl Harbor as the beginning of a pivot point in the life of the world, of nations. This is when things began to change, and we can trace that change to one day, to one violent act or series of acts. In this case, October 7th, 2023 in Israel by Hamas.

So as noted, the two things that a lot of people, me included, didn't perceive immediately was, this is very, very strange. How could this happen? And it turns out, the more you know about Israel, the way the country is run, how it's laid out, the geography of Israel, the security situation in Israel, the more confusing this looked to you. And one of the very first people to notice this was a woman named Efrat Fenningsen, who was unknown to most non-Israelis before that day, but who had served, like most Israelis, in the IDF, and shot a video, a couple of videos, from her apartment in Israel, and basically said, I'm not sure how this could happen, because I'm very fluent in how this country is defended, and this doesn't make any sense. How could these foreign fighters get across the most heavily guarded border in the world, some of them in gliders? It doesn't make sense to me.

Now, from what we understand, she has not lived in Israel since, but she was one of the very first people who the rest of us saw question the official account of October 7th. The second person most of us saw make these obvious remarks was Charlie Kirk. Five days after October 7th, he went into a podcast and said, this doesn't make any sense. Here's Charlie Kirk from five days after that tragedy.

Charlie Kirk (4:14)

I've been to Israel many times. The whole country is a fortress. When I first heard this story, I still have the same gut instinct that I did initially. I find this very hard to believe. I've been to that Gaza border. You cannot go 10 feet without running into a 19 year old with an AR-15 or an automatic machine gun that is an IDF soldier, right? The whole country is surveilled. And so let me just kind of go through this. We don't talk about Israeli politics very often and most Americans don't know this. The last nine months, Israel is on the brink of civil war. It's not an exaggeration. This judicial stuff, there were hundreds of thousands of Israelis taking to the streets because Bibi Netanyahu was basically redefining the Israeli Constitution. That's not an exaggeration, right? He said the judicial branch has too much power. There were protests planned this week against Netanyahu where they anticipated tens of thousands of people to take to the streets. That's all gone, Patrick. Netanyahu now has an emergency government and a mandate to lead.