Sebastian Gorka, deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism at the White House National Security Council, made the comments at a Hudson Institute event in Washington DC on Tuesday.
“This wing of isolationism is nothing new. We had this 100 years ago, and this is just a poor, substandard repackaging of neo-Buchananite isolationism,” Gorka said when asked about the growth of anti-Israel and antisemitic content on right-wing podcasts over the last year. “The Tucker right wing is basically, you know, Pat Buchanan in a new guise. It is actually a shallower version. Pat is far smarter than this version of isolationism ."
Carlson has emerged as one of the most prominent right-wing critics of Israel following the October 7 massacre and his exit from Fox News. He has publicly opposed the Trump Administration's support for Israel. In June, he opposed Operations Rising Lion and Midnight Hammer, claiming that the American and Israeli strikes on Iran's nuclear weapons program risked sparking World War Three and costing thousands of American lives. The war against Iran ended after 12 days without sparking a larger conflict or causing a single American casualty.
Carlson has been accused of antisemitism by other figures on the right, including Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who questioned Carlson's obsession with Israel.
Carlson has also been criticized for his interviews with the President of Iran and the Prime Minister of Qatar, two Islamist nations with appalling human rights records. Last year, he conducted an interview with Darryl Cooper, a fringe "historian" who called Winston Churchill the "chief villain of the Second World War" and not Adolf Hitler, and claimed that six million Jews "ended up dead" rather than were murdered by the Nazis.