Our old friend Joel Mowbray — Joel, where have you been? — asks the question that occurs to me with respect to Vice President Vance’s amigo Tucker Carlson. Why the incessant lying about..well, you know who?
🚨 EXCLUSIVE — Tucker is at it again.
Tucker just claimed that the Christian population of Israel has plunged since 1948.
That is false. After Israel’s founding, there were 34,000 Christians.
Today, there are 184,000.
In contrast, Christians have not fared well under Palestinian Muslim leadership.
In 1949, there were 51,000 Christians in the West Bank, or 6.7% of the overall population. Today, the number is down to 45,000, or 1.6% of the total.
Before Hamas violently took control of Gaza from the Palestinian Authority in 2006, there were approximately 5,000 Christians in the coastal enclave. Shortly before Israel’s response to 10/7, that number had plummeted by almost 80%, to just 1,100 in all of Gaza (and comparable today).
While Christians have decreased somewhat as a percentage of the Israeli population — from 2.9% to 1.9% today — there has been significant Jewish immigration from Russia and elsewhere, and Jewish fertility in Israel is significantly higher than for Christians, who now reproduce at below replacement level.
At the end of this clip, taken from the monologue for his show taped yesterday in Jordan, Tucker also claimed that in the past few years, the Christian population has decreased even more rapidly.
Again, at least in Israel, this is false. The Christian population grew by 2% in just the past year (2024 to 2025), from 180K to 184K.
All of this information is easily accessible, yet Tucker instead chose to peddle verifiably false figures.
Why?
Why the incessant lies?
🚨 EXCLUSIVE — Tucker is at it again.
Tucker just claimed that the Christian population of Israel has plunged since 1948.
That is false. After Israel's founding, there were 34,000 Christians.
Today, there are 184,000.
In contrast, Christians have not fared well under… pic.twitter.com/KhBdceBxrn
— Joel Mowbray (@joelmowbray) February 5, 2026
Mosaic Daily editor Andrew Koss observed this morning:
On Wednesday, the Internet talk-show host Tucker Carlson released a video titled, “The Shocking Reality of the Treatment of Christians in the Holy Land by U.S.-Funded Israel.” The content closely parallels the smear-campaigns against the Jewish state one hears from the political left, but is geared toward a Christian audience. Virtually every sentence contains falsehoods and partial truths suggesting, contrary to all evidence, that Israel persecutes Christians, while the Palestinian Authority, Jordan, and various other Muslim states protect them.
The video is by now par for the course from Carlson, who has made an obsession with Jews and Israel a central theme—if not the major theme—of his output. Carlson’s embrace of the anti-Semitic right has given a stamp of mainstream approval to tendencies that have always lurked on the fringes, but have become bolder in the past few years.
Koss adds this for those who may want to mull it over:
To discuss this trend, Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver recorded a conversation with the conservative essayist Rod Dreher—a devout Christian, a friend of the Jews, and an idiosyncratic and engaging thinker about social and political issues. Dreher, a veteran of the American right, has more than once sounded the alarm on the threat to Jews that comes from his side of the political spectrum. He wrote a moving, and deeply personal, essay for Mosaic in 2020 on why Christians ought not turn their backs on the Hebrew Bible. You can listen to him speak about the return of rightwing anti-Semitism here.
Hatred of Jews is an eternal phenomemon, but the case of Tucker Carlson calls for some further explanation.
