By Howie Silbiger
If you’ve been watching Tucker Carlson lately, Israel keeps coming up, and not just in passing, it keeps coming back, again and again, until you start noticing how much of an obsession it has become.
This isn’t regular criticism, it feels different. It’s more focused, more deliberate. Benjamin Netanyahu is always right there in the middle of it, everything somehow circles back to him, and there’s always the suggestion hanging in the air that there’s something bigger going on, something you’re not quite being told.
It never really fleshed out, though, that’s the thing, it just hovers there, keeping people wondering. If you watch enough of it and you start to recognize the pattern, you’re always one step away from it all clicking, like the next segment is going to pull it together, but it never does, it just resets and does it again in a slightly different way.
Although I despise his views on Israel, Noam Chomsky is an expert on media. Years ago, he wrote a book called “Manufacturing Consent”. The theory was that it doesn’t matter if a story is true, nor if there is any proof of the story, if the media decides its true, or it’s a narrative they want to forward, they push certain elements and gloss over others and create the narrative. It’s exactly why there is mass outrage when Israel drops a bomb on a military target in a civilian neighbourhood, but utter silence when missiles land directly on the heads of Israeli civilians. The media chose sides and fit the narrative to their vision.
If you keep the tone steady and don’t move off it, and keep repeating it long enough, people stop hearing it as one take, and it becomes the default narrative that everyone believes. Nazi propagandist Josef Goebels understood this and used the concept (before Chomsky codified it), to convince the masses that Jews were subhuman and deserved to be exterminated.
That’s what this feels like.
It’s all about the buildup, one piece, then another, then another, all leaning the same way. After a while it stops feeling like separate things, it just blends. And Tucker Carlson’s not the only one, there are a bunch of voices that have all drifted into this same lane, more or less at the same time. Different styles, different audiences, but the core doesn’t really move. Israel framed in a certain way, Netanyahu at the center of it, and this constant push that there’s something deeper going on behind the scenes. The details shift depending on who’s talking, the direction doesn’t.
Tucker Carlson fits into the box pretty easily. He’s not really breaking anything new here, he’s feeding something that’s already been built, a clip, a guest, now a documentary, it all drops into the same structure. and it just keeps reinforcing the same thing.
Recently he started promoting this “banned in Israel” documentary. The ‘banned’ line does most of the work without anyone having to explain much. You hear that and you already know how it’s supposed to land, something got shut down, something crossed a line…Except that’s not at all what happened, Tucker Carlson is a liar.
The film he is promoting as “banned” uses leaked police interrogation footage tied to ongoing corruption cases involving Israeli PM Netanyahu. Israel restricts that kind of material while cases are active, that’s not mysterious or milicious, that’s Israeli law.
But that version doesn’t sell. “Banned” does.
So that’s the version Carlson pushes, and once it’s out there; that’s the version that sticks. Nobody’s digging into the details at that point, they’ve already bought the story.
The film itself doesn’t even have to carry the weight anymore, it just slides into everything that’s already been built around it. The claims, the attempts to link Israel to Qatar, to Hamas, to all these back channels and influence networks, none of that is new, it’s been around for years, reported, argued over, stretched, depending on who’s telling it.
Even the “banned” film had its moment. It was big enough to get a 2025 Academy Award nomination. It was watched, people debated the content and then it faded, kinda like everything eventually does.
But now it’s made a comeback, not because there’s anything new to watch, but because an anti-Israel pundit, who has been spreading lies about Israel for months now, decided that it fits his narrative. It’s the same material, new push, louder framing, dropped into an audience that’s already been primed in a very specific direction. And once it gets there, it doesn’t have to prove much, it just has to sound familiar enough.
And that’s all it really is, familiar. Not necessarily true, not necessarily false, just something people have heard enough times that they stop separating fiction from reality.
And once that happens, it’s nearly impossible to reverse the trend.
Howie Silbiger is the host of The Howie Silbiger Show on Truetalkradio.com and Political Hitman on Israelnewstalkradio.com. He is the Editor in Chief of The Montreal Jewish News.
