In early March 2026, on his podcast, media personality Tucker Carlson suggested that Chabad-Lubavitch , a global Hasidic outreach movement, was secretly orchestrating U.S.-Israeli military conflicts with Iran to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque and to rebuild the Third Temple in Jerusalem.

Jewish leaders, media watchdogs, and commentators criticized these remarks as baseless, dangerous, and a revival of ancient antisemitic tropes regarding Jewish control over world events. And while Tucker Carlson is a rabid antisemite, that is not what bothers me. It is not even his conspiratorial tone that gets to me.

What get’s me going is that he really believes that he was breaking a story. Did one of his staffers wander into 770? For that matter had they walked into any synagogue any where in the world at any time since the destruction of the Second Temple?

I was thinking about this when reading the Haftarah for Emor from the book of Ezekiel. According to the narrative, Ezekiel prophesied the destruction of Judah’s capital city Jerusalem. In 587 BC, the Neo-Babylonian Empire conquered Jerusalem, destroyed Solomon’s Temple, and sent the Judahite upper classes into the Babylonian captivity. However, Ezekiel also prophesied the eventual restoration of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel. In our Haftarah this week, Ezekiel prophesies about the service of the priest in the 3rd Temple which will be rebuilt after the Final Redemption. (Ezekiel 44:15-31.)

So either Ezekiel and Chabad are just terrible at their job or they are both expressing a foundation Jewish yearning. Alternatively Tucker Carlson’s notion of a hot breaking story includes one that is 2613 years old. Now that is some some high quality news coverage. Religious yearning is not the same military plotting or the Elders of Zion pulling the strings of power. So either he is a fool ( Ezekiel is also in Tucker’s Bible) or just into antisemitic incitement.