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Ben Shapiro and Tucker battle over response to Hamas: ‘I don’t know the game he’s playing’

October 12, 2023 | | Print Article

A feud between Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson is brewing, and reactions on X appear to be split down the middle.

On Monday, Carlson released Episode #29 of his “Tucker on X” series in which he discussed with Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy the “selective moral outrage” that has erupted since Hamas executed its brutal attack on the people of Israel.

Both Carlson and Ramaswamy were clear that Hamas was wrong to invade Israel and stressed that Israel has every right to defend itself, but questioned what response would now be in America’s best interests.

At the 12:20 mark in the episode, Carlson noted that the horrific videos of Hamas militants kidnapping and executing Israeli citizens are “morally outrageous,” but stated, “You don’t have to look far in the United States for moral outrages also on video.”

“There’s not a city in this country — not just the big cities, cities of 10,000 people. I was in one of them yesterday — that doesn’t have some constellation of drug-addicted young people living outside,” Carlson said. “They call them ‘homeless.’ They’re drug addicts, and they’re addicted to drugs that were imported across an open border, allowed by the Biden administration, and they’re dying, more than 100,000 a year.”

“Now, you can call it ‘genocide,'” Carlson said. “You can call it whatever you want. But it’s the death of over 100,000 Americans a year and the living death of millions more who are living outside.”

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He went on to say that he “gets” that people are outraged over what happened in Israel, “but the scale of the outrage among Republican presidential candidates was so much more intense — one of them took to a bullhorn and started yelling about it. I get it. But no one would think to do that about the 100,000 American young people murdered every year — and they are murdered, honestly — by synthetic opioids.”

Shapiro, who is Jewish, called Tucker’s take “pathetic.”

“It’s pathetic that he engaged in this sort of nonsense,” Shapiro stated. “Truly. He’s a smart person and either he thinks you’re stupid or he’s engaging in stupidity. I don’t know which it is.”

American drug deaths and the kidnapping and rape of Israeli women, he argued, “are two completely different issues.”

“To go this far afield to link the issues, the only reason you’re doing this is because you wish to downplay the atrocity that just happened in Israel,” Shapiro continued. “You’re not up-playing the atrocity of what’s happening on America streets. Those are two different types of atrocities.”

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“People who are addicted to Fentanyl, sticking needles in their arms and overdosing, is a moral blight,” he said. “It is a moral atrocity and a moral evil for people to kidnap women, rape them, and drag them back to the Gaza border. Those are not the same thing, and Tucker knows that, but this is a cheap way of telling you not to look, don’t look, stop caring, because, after all, what does it matter?”

“I don’t know who thinks that’s a sophisticated point of view, especially when nobody is calling for America to go to war with Iran,” Shapiro said, adding, “I don’t even know the game [Tucker’s] playing.”

“This is just a dumb game,” he stated.

“Shapiro is right,” wrote one user on X. “Tucker is wrong.”

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Others who viewed Shapiro’s response to Carlson came to a very different conclusion.

“Ben Shapiro squeals when Tucker Carlson asks Vivek why politicians in America don’t care more about the millions of Americans killed by the opioid and fetanyl [sic] crises,” said one user. “Why doesn’t Shapiro enlist in the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] if he’s so passionate?”

“Ben Shapiro is almost in tears of rage because Tucker Carlson is taking a sensible America First stance on events in the Middle East,” said Substack writer Keith Woods. “Ben does not represent the average American conservative who is more concerned about their country than a dispute on the other side of the world.”

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“Ben Shapiro throws a fit after Tucker Carlson suggests Americans should be more concerned with the 100,000 annual OD deaths in the U.S. than the 500 foreigners who died 7,000 miles away,” wrote Fox News contributor Richard Strocher.

“‘Feelings don’t care about your facts’ -Ben Shapiro,” he added.

Perhaps we should describe Strocher as a “former” Fox News contributor.

Strocher followed up his posts with, “I was just fired from FOX news for this tweet…. I will always stand for truth!”

Still, others are clearly on Team Tucker.

“Ben Shapiro is insufferable. His ‘takedown’ of Tucker was completely misguided,” argued one user. “Tucker was not making light of the situation in Israel. He was merely pointing out that DC is never focused on the American people. Tucker is right!”

Melissa Fine
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