Tucker Carlson interviews data analyst Israel Stephen Semler on the costs of the Iran war, US military spending, and aid to Israel
Stephen Semler, independent data analyst and newsletter writer behind the Substack Polygraph, joins Tucker Carlson to examine the financial and political costs of the US war with Iran.
Summary
Tucker Carlson sits down with Stephen Semler, who runs the Substack newsletter Polygraph, to examine the hard numbers behind US military spending, the Iran war, and American aid to Israel. Semler reveals that the Iran war is the most unpopular war in the history of US polling, beginning at -13% net support and falling to -35% — worse than any previous American conflict. He argues that the Congressional Budget Office's official $38 billion war cost estimate is dramatically understated, and that his own independent analysis, corroborated by internal Pentagon figures, puts the cost at over $100 billion for the first 120 days alone. He also discusses the scale of US cumulative aid to Israel and the broader costs — budgetary and economic — borne by ordinary Americans as a result of ongoing military commitments. He draws on his own past experience as a lobbyist for the Littoral Combat Ship program to explain how the military-industrial complex operates, and the conversation concludes with an extended discussion of the Gaza conflict, Israeli territorial expansion, and Semler's personal moral reckoning with having initially ignored the issue.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction and the Iran War's Unprecedented Unpopularity
Tucker Carlson: Stephen, thank you very much for coming on. The reason I'm so excited to talk to you is because it's hard to find anyone who pays attention to the numbers. It's easy to find people with opinions and sweeping theories about the rise and fall of nations. But to find someone who actually keeps track of what we're spending on this or that, or what people think about this or that as recorded in public opinion polling — that's pretty hard, actually. And you are probably the most well-known person who does that. So thank you very much. Let me just ask you — let's start with the Iran war and its popularity. Democracy kind of demands that if you're going to do big things, you've got public buy-in, because you're doing it on behalf of the public, reportedly. How is this war viewed by the public in the United States?
Israel Stephen Semler: It's the most unpopular war since polling began.
Tucker Carlson: Really?
Israel Stephen Semler: Yeah. There's a joint poll that's been conducted on a near-weekly basis since the start of the war through the present, by The Economist and YouGov. They've polled Americans on whether the Iran war has been the right decision or the wrong decision. It started at negative 13% net support — meaning 13 percentage points more people opposed the war than supported it. So most Americans opposed the war the day it started.
Tucker Carlson: From the jump — 13 percentage points. I have to stop you there, because that itself is unusual. If memory serves, when wars start with fireworks and flags and all that, most people are kind of all in.
Israel Stephen Semler: Right, it's sort of cathartic at the beginning.
Tucker Carlson: Exactly.
Israel Stephen Semler: But then it wears off over time. And all wars, Tucker, get more unpopular over time. Even World War II, which started off with something like 95% support. But even the Iraq war in 2003 —
Tucker Carlson: Yeah, that started off at I believe plus 40% or something.
Israel Stephen Semler: Is that true? Wow. I forgot that. Okay.
Tucker Carlson: And the Afghanistan war even higher. And of course those have tumbled down over time.
Israel Stephen Semler: Yeah. But the point is that all major US wars since World War II have started with positive net support. The Iran war is the only one that has started at a negative number in terms of net support. And over time it's only gotten more unpopular. At the time we're having this conversation, according to the latest data, it's at -35 net support.
Tucker Carlson: -35.
Israel Stephen Semler: Yeah. And for context, that makes it the most unpopular war ever.
Tucker Carlson: I bet — I'm not an epidemiologist — but I bet there are diseases with higher ratings than that.
Israel Stephen Semler: Yeah, I would assume so. It's a near-universally unpopular policy. And even if you look at the additional Iran war questions on this poll — you don't get them from the summary sheet, you have to actually dig through the data — even among the people who still say it was the right decision, about half of them want it to end as quickly as possible. They won't really admit it was the wrong decision, but when asked "should we end it as quickly as possible?" — yes, absolutely. I love this. I hope it's over soon.
Tucker Carlson: Yes. Yes. Yes.
Israel Stephen Semler: I really think it was a great decision. Can it end? We needed it to end yesterday.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah, exactly. Okay. Well, that's really interesting. I sense that. I strongly felt that myself, but I was also surprised by how little effort the administration went to to sell it ahead of time. Usually these things are the product of a long run-up, a rollout.
Israel Stephen Semler: Yeah, there was a steady buildup of military assets, but the Trump administration didn't prime the press. They didn't square the UN in the same way that the Bush administration did in the run-up to Iraq. To my knowledge, even though there was this one or two month-long buildup, and then last June there was the attack by the US on Iranian nuclear facilities — I believe on June 21st, 2025 —
Tucker Carlson: That's correct.
Israel Stephen Semler: And then there's the history that had built up, and Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, lobbied the White House famously. They met in early January, I believe — Trump and Netanyahu. And then in February, after a briefing with Netanyahu, Trump decided to go to war, and the US was at war a couple of weeks later. But during this whole time, there was no real concerted effort to get people on board. And because over time US presidents have an enormous amount of latitude to basically go to war outside of congressional approval — as required by law — they find legal justifications to work their way around it. And the worst part is Congress, for the most part, isn't interested in constraining presidential decisions. So why did the US go to war with Iran? Multiple reasons we can discuss, but I think one of the main reasons is there's nothing stopping it.
Tucker Carlson: There's no institutional pushback from Congress — even from the opposition party. So Chuck Schumer hasn't demanded a congressional resolution declaring war on Iran, even though we've been at war with Iran since February 28th.
Israel Stephen Semler: They've introduced a lot of war powers resolutions. The problem I have with Democrats, among many, is they refuse to take on the budgets that enable wars in the first place.
Tucker Carlson: Exactly.
Israel Stephen Semler: So we have all these symbolic votes — non-binding resolutions that would ostensibly order Trump to withdraw all troops from the Middle East engaged in hostilities with Iran. But Democrats are very excited — a very select number of Democrats — and then on the opposite side, an even smaller number of Republicans who are actually willing to take on the military budget. I think Democrats realize there's a lot of currency and political capital to be gained by coming across as anti-war. So they'll speak out about it, and they'll say they're anti-war, but they'll vote for the budgets that enable war in the first place.
The Defense Budget and the Military-Industrial Complex
Tucker Carlson: So let's talk about that budget. The defense budget — or I guess now it's called the war budget, since it's the war department — has grown at higher than the rate of inflation, which is saying a lot. Where are we now on the defense budget?
Israel Stephen Semler: We're at $1.1 trillion. That's the enacted budget for fiscal year 2026, which actually ended on September 30th. So we're still at that level through what's called a continuing resolution — it just continues the levels. That includes the base budget that's enacted every year, plus the amount of money that came from the Big Beautiful Bill. There's about $150 billion in military funding in the Big Beautiful Bill — the first reconciliation bill passed in, I believe, July 2025 under the second Trump administration.
Tucker Carlson: Too little attention is paid to this. So $1.1 trillion. That's by far the largest piece of the discretionary budget. Nothing even comes close. That's the majority of the discretionary budget, as far as I know.
Israel Stephen Semler: Oh yeah. Every year, the budget that Congress votes on — military spending occupies more than half of it.
Tucker Carlson: Right. The rest being what we call entitlements, or things that just keep going until the government goes back.
Israel Stephen Semler: The discretionary budget is the one that Congress votes on every year. And then entitlement spending — the mandatory spending — the stuff that operates basically as trust funds and keeps going regardless of whether the government is operating or whether we're experiencing a shutdown — that's a separate amount. But there are 12 funding bills that Congress approves every year to fund the federal agencies that basically keep the government going, and of that amount, military spending is over half. And if you look at all US government spending in a given year — including the mandatory resources — you're getting to about a third. And if you include militarized domestic security apparatuses and the proportionate responsibility each of those has to the national debt, then you're talking about the largest component of US spending every year being on war and policing, effectively.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah. How's that going? So actually — how is it going? $1.1 trillion. And as far as I know, we can't get our fabled aircraft carriers anywhere near the Iranian coast. We can't secure passage of shipping through the strait. We can't keep the Red Sea open. We can't subdue the Houthis, who we're told are this primitive qat-chewing tribe in the mountains of Yemen. So what exactly is this money going to? If you can't beat the Houthis with $1.1 trillion — try not to use profanity here — what is this for?
Israel Stephen Semler: Well, one way to answer that question is that more than half of the annual military budget goes to for-profit contractors.
For $1.1 trillion, you could just buy Yemen.
Tucker Carlson: No, I'm serious. You could buy the country, which apparently I've never been to.
Israel Stephen Semler: Yeah, the military budget is larger than the economies of a lot of countries.
Tucker Carlson: Of most countries. $1.1 trillion. There's no African country with a $1.1 trillion GDP. So why wouldn't you just buy Yemen? What is the point here? Is it to enrich Boeing?
Israel Stephen Semler: If you want to look at it through a lens of how the military-industrial complex operates — it gets an enormous amount of money through the annual military budget. That money flows into profits, shareholders, and executive pay. The executives at the top weapons manufacturers, who get the majority of their revenue from the US government, make $20 million, $30 million a year. And these are basically public firms statistically speaking, and most of their money comes from taxpayers, but they're allowed to profit like —
Tucker Carlson: They're making $30 million a year.
Israel Stephen Semler: Yeah. Top executives. Boeing, Lockheed, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin. And then a portion of that revenue is recycled back into the political system through lobbying, through campaign contributions, and through an underrated method of influence — the funding of think tanks in Washington DC. Which gives them — who produce reports that are not objectively PR material, but fall within a certain spectrum that is allowable for the arms industry — a sort of academic or technocratic gloss that it wouldn't otherwise have through lobbying or campaign contributions. Makes it easier to justify.
Tucker Carlson: So you send money to AEI or Heritage or Brookings.
Israel Stephen Semler: I'll give you an example. CSIS — Center for Strategic and International Studies — is a very establishmenty think tank. Henry Kissinger was on the board there at some point. It's bipartisan, of course, and it develops Iran war cost estimates in an intelligent way. Their research is actually well-grounded, but they will sound the alarm when it comes to war costs related to US munitions expenditures. Raising that alarm — and again, it's justifiably so, the US has burned an enormous amount of munitions in Iran — helps create a demand to buy more weapons, as the war itself has.
Tucker Carlson: It's like you need new toner cartridges.
Israel Stephen Semler: Yes. Yes. You've bought the hardware, but the actual profit is on the toner cartridges, the oil changes, the munitions — the stuff you have to keep buying. And my main pet peeve in this sort of national security intellectualism that happens in DC is they turn political problems into technocratic or technical problems waiting to be solved. The US is experiencing a shortfall in missile interceptors — interceptors are missiles that shoot down other missiles, as everyone is aware at this point. The US has burned such vast quantities of these interceptors during the Iran war that it has created a shortfall and subsequently a PR nightmare for the Trump administration and the people in Congress who support the war. Now, the obvious solution to the interceptor problem is to look at the main cause of why we've run low in the first place, which is the war. Instead, we're getting these —
Tucker Carlson: Wait, so pointless wars are tough on your munition stockpiles. Is that what you're saying, Tucker?
Israel Stephen Semler: It turns out that to be the case. I know this is shocking to some people. But people who do have PhDs are developing these 20-page reports on how to replenish the stockpiles without really calling for an explicit end to the Iran war. They're just tinkering around — "oh, how can we increase the yearly production capacity from the projected 650 Patriot interceptors in fiscal year 2027 to 750, and how do we invest in the solid rocket supplier base, and how do we get the critical minerals we need to accelerate production?" What are you talking about? We have a problem that is caused by war. And if your first recommendation isn't to stop that war, I just can't take that seriously. That's the kind of analysis you get even on a very narrow subject like rebuilding the inventory.
Tucker Carlson: So this is part of their lobbying budget. Lockheed, for example — just to pick one — would spend money it gets from the government building the weapons it has sold to the government, employing its workforce, and all that. But then part of the money would go to lobbying, either directly or through influence campaigns laundered through so-called think tanks.
Israel Stephen Semler: They spend money on advertising too. One of the main things I do — I run this newsletter called Polygraph on Substack — is I state the obvious but in a very specific way. For every military budget that Congress votes on every year, I compare the yes and no votes, and I compare how much each respective vote category took from arms industry donors before voting. And lo and behold, as you're totally unsurprised to hear, the members of Congress who receive more money from arms companies and military contractors are more likely to vote for the military budget and military budget increases.
Tucker Carlson: Oh, wow. Really?
Israel Stephen Semler: Yeah. So there's at least a correlation. And when people say "duh," I say yeah, I'm not surprised either. But when we talk about money in politics, people say oh, everyone knows it's a problem, but you approach a certain politician about it and they say, "Oh, it doesn't affect my vote, you have no proof." It's like — here, if every year I'm noticing that members of Congress who vote for a military spending increase take three to five times more arms industry cash than members opposed to military spending increases, then we've moved the conversation. We're suddenly on the offensive, because now members of Congress have to say, "Okay, this correlation exists. And you're part of this group who on average takes three to five times more money from the companies that profit from war, and you've just voted for a record amount of military spending."
Tucker Carlson: Well, yeah — especially considering the use of these weapons. It's one thing if we're defending the homeland against a ground invasion. Defend the homeland — got it, fine. But these are totally pointless wars disconnected from America's national interest, in which unarmed civilians, kids, get killed. There's no justification for any of it. It's repulsive.
Israel Stephen Semler: Morally — I mean, I'm not going to claim to be a moral authority. I can tell you how much it costs, though. As someone who's followed these costs, it's incredibly taxing on the conscience.
Tucker Carlson: Well, can I just ask — unless I'm misunderstanding — you're saying that some of these, maybe all of these weapons manufacturers, derive most of their income and profits from the taxpayer?
Israel Stephen Semler: The major ones, yes. For example, Lockheed Martin received, I think, 73% of its income from DoD contracts, and then even more from US government-brokered sales to foreign countries. So all in all, when you combine the revenue that Lockheed Martin received from government contracts plus the arms deals arranged and executed through the US government, you're talking about a company through which 97% of their revenue is tied to policy. They're just working for US taxpayers, who are their only real customer.
Tucker Carlson: What you're saying is they're taking taxpayer money and using it to lobby taxpayers for more taxpayer money.
Israel Stephen Semler: This is how the military —
Tucker Carlson: How is that allowed? If I don't pay my taxes, I go to jail. So they're taking money from me at gunpoint — the majority of my income, because I'm not in private equity and I pay labor tax just like everyone else does on wages. And so the majority of my money goes to the government by force, and then the government sends that to people who lecture and lobby me and my elected representatives to take more of the money. How is that a fair system?
Israel Stephen Semler: That's a question you can ask in a lot of sectors as well. The difference is — and that's right, what you're saying is true, it's not just this sector — but the one thing that's special to this sector is that we're talking about a state-run economy. When we talk about the US arms industry, it's primarily a socialized system. It's top-down. It's about state planning, delegation, contracts. And members of Congress really like it because they can direct government contracts to their districts. You usually have to hire lobbyists for this, and they write legislation a certain way that narrows down the list of eligible companies that can bid on a contract, and then you work your legislative magic to alter the text in the bills so that one company is given a very high chance of being able to carry out a certain project — and you know that company has links to your district as a member of Congress. Shipbuilding in Maine and Mississippi, munitions in Tennessee, aerospace in California. Every state, every congressional district has a piece of this.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah. And through this process — it's called either political engineering or geographic engineering — these arms companies deliberately spread out their assets to touch as many congressional districts as possible.
Israel Stephen Semler: So when lobbyists get together to keep afloat a dying and deeply fraudulent project — like the Littoral Combat Ship, which was eventually killed off in the last couple of years — in the early teens it had a hugely problematic history, and there was this massive lobbying effort in the mid-2020s to keep funding going to this very problematic ship even though it had tons of technical flaws. There was literally a crack developing in the hull of the ship because they were made of aluminum and not steel. A massive amount of technical problems — this ship was just never going to deliver, and it was obvious. But there was this huge lobbying effort where a group of lobbyists organized all of the suppliers, contractors, and subcontractors involved in the production of this — what John McCain called the "little crappy ship," the LCS. I'm going to slip into the first person here because I was a part of this lobbying effort. We developed a map and a huge spreadsheet of all the different areas that projects were related to and how many people were employed. So when we went to congressional offices to lobby for this project, the white paper we provided had some sort of national security justification — usually just grabbed from an arms industry-funded think tank — and then the real line, at the bottom, was: "And by the way, this company employs 550 people in your district."
The True Cost of the Iran War
Tucker Carlson: Wait, so you were a lobbyist for this? So you're like a whistleblower, basically.
Israel Stephen Semler: No, I was a very small part — a very small cog in the machine. But I gained enough knowledge to get an understanding of how the system works. Were people cynical about it? Did they think that what they were producing was going to make the world better, or was that not part of it? I did get the feeling that some people — I asked about it especially towards the end, because towards the end I had basically figured out who I was and was morally opposed to this through and through. But when the subject came up, when I tried to bring it up indirectly, I got the sense that a lot of people were talking themselves into a moral high ground that didn't exactly exist. And the stuff they were saying was less directed at me and more like reaffirmations for themselves.
Tucker Carlson: I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.
Israel Stephen Semler: Yeah. There was a sense of entitlement, but also a moral component too. It was just odd to see.
Tucker Carlson: The world needs 2,000-pound bombs.
Israel Stephen Semler: Yes. Has to. And we're helping — we're delivering savings to the taxpayer by helping the F-35 stay funded, even though it has tons of problems.
Tucker Carlson: How interesting. Well, I think it makes you much more credible that you have experience from the inside watching all this.
Israel Stephen Semler: Trained by the best.
So this defense budget — $1.1 trillion — that seems way higher than I remember it.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah. So in 2021 the military budget was $741 billion — in nominal terms, because that's how Congress remembers these things, a little bit higher if you adjust for inflation. When Biden entered office it was $741 billion, and when he left it was close to $850 billion or something. So it increased over the course of the Biden administration. Before him it increased under Trump. It increased under the first term of Obama, then went down. But pretty much since 2015 or 2016, the military budget has gone upward pretty much every year, even after accounting for inflation.
Israel Stephen Semler: So basically everything Eisenhower warned about has come true. The defense industrial —
Tucker Carlson: Yeah. Eisenhower was worried about basically the war machine becoming sentient. This collection of interests would sort of not necessarily execute corruption in smoke-filled rooms with cash on the table — although that happens — but it's more about creating the conditions where Capitol Hill is just operating in its own world, insulated from the interests of everyone else. And when you start mixing in profit interests to decisions about war and peace and people's security, I have a massive problem with that — especially when it's not even working. It's not even achieving your stated aims.
Israel Stephen Semler: Whether or not I agree with those aims — which I don't — but even if I did, I would say it's fair to measure your performance by the standards that you articulated. "We have the greatest military in the world. It can do this." But you haven't done it. So what's your explanation?
It's one of those cases where we're going to hear more and more from Trump administration officials — like Pete Hegseth, for example — that "oh, it's Congress that's not letting us win the war." No, no, no. We haven't even accomplished the military objectives that were laid out. Iran is still able to project power across its borders. Congrats — you've beat up on a country that has the GDP of Kentucky or Illinois or something like that, but it still controls the Strait of Hormuz for the most part. It's still able to project power outside of its borders. And whenever the cost of the Iran war is brought up, the rebuttal is: "Okay, well this war is about preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. So how much would you pay for Iran to not have a nuclear weapon?" Which is a false question. It's patently absurd, because it requires someone to believe that this war won't actually make Iran's interest in acquiring a nuclear weapon more likely — which I think it would. If I were them, it would definitely heighten my interest in acquiring one.
Tucker Carlson: Iran's getting a nuke.
Israel Stephen Semler: And by the end of this, there will be nothing we can do about it. And maybe at that point we'll find it in ourselves to actually be honest negotiators and negotiate an arms control agreement.
Tucker Carlson: We had a war in June of 2025 that we were told ended their capacity to create nuclear weapons.
Israel Stephen Semler: Right. And of course, those of us who were watching carefully knew it had nothing to do with nuclear weapons. Neither did the subsequent regime change effort that followed it. All of it was a lie. Nothing to do with Iran's nuclear weapons. They didn't have a nuclear program that was close to producing a nuclear weapon, and they didn't have the means to deliver it. They had no ICBMs. The whole thing was a joke. There's really a reliance on the Trump administration and Trump administration officials to — it's a performative war in a sense where people aren't expected to gauge success or failure based on political outcomes, but just actions that the US takes. For Pete Hegseth, he expects people to just be enamored with the use of force and violence and derive some sort of value or entertainment from it. But most people are morally opposed to that sort of thing unless it's absolutely necessary — and it's actively undermining their material interests at home. Because this war, for the average person, is morally repugnant. It's a betrayal of the campaign promises that Trump ran on. And it's also, in a material sense, making their lives worse — both as consumers, because they're paying higher gas prices and higher prices for everything as a result of the inflationary war spike, and also as taxpayers, because they're on the hook for the bill that the Trump administration is about to send them for the war.
Tucker Carlson: So let's discuss that. Let's discuss the totality of the cost. You just named the big drivers — it's not simply the defense budget or whatever additional funding they're going to require to backfill all the munitions they blew. It's also the cost in inflation. Summarize and then dig into the costs, if you would.
Israel Stephen Semler: So I pay attention to the narrow set of costs called direct war costs — the immediate budgetary expenses from the war that the US is on the hook for. The broader costs, the indirect war costs, refer to the costs to the economy. There was a Moody's analysis that found the average household paid $2,000 more as a result of the war, mostly due to inflation, higher fuel costs, and that sort of thing. I pay attention to the numbers that the Pentagon is supposed to faithfully report regarding the war's current costs. But the Pentagon has refused to provide those numbers. They provide a topline number that's dubious. The most detail they've provided publicly is a summary table that left a lot of stuff out — it didn't count the cost of replacing bases, for example. It didn't count the cost of moving money around in the Pentagon budget to pay for war operations that would have gone to something else. So that has opened up the space for independent analysts to assess the cost of the Iran war.
For the first 60 days of the Iran war, I estimated that it cost $72 billion in direct costs — between operations, replacing the munitions that were expended, damage to US military bases, and military aid to Israel. Then the next month, the Trump administration requested an $87 billion supplemental funding bill — literally money supplemental to the main budget that Congress approves every year, mostly for Iran war-related expenses. And according to the Kiel Institute and others who have read the bill, it also included $72 billion for war-related costs. Then for the next estimate, over 120 days, I arrived at $103 billion. And then a week later, there were two reports from NBC and Wired that internal Pentagon estimates had the war at around $100 billion as well. So by this point I'm feeling very pleased with myself, because I had a number that was then corroborated by the amount the administration requested for the war, and then by internal Pentagon assessments through the rank-and-file people who do the budget work there.
But then last month — in September — the Congressional Budget Office came out with their report on the cost of the Iran war, and they arrived at $38 billion. An extremely low number.
Tucker Carlson: $38 billion. Shockingly low. So the CBO — it became the authoritative war cost estimate because the Congressional Budget Office is a technocratic group that's nonpartisan. Its job is to assess the cost of legislation that Congress passes, various proposals and policies. And because of that, their war cost estimate was treated as genuine. But when you went through it —
Israel Stephen Semler: The mistakes that were made in their report were just shocking. Just basic matters of fact. For example, under equipment losses, it put that the US had lost 24 MQ-9 Reaper drones as of August 1st. This is a five-month estimate. That number came from a Congressional Research Service report published in May that had that number — 24 losses. But that report was based on a CBS report from an unnamed US official from the first week of April regarding US war losses. So effectively, the CBO, for their official war cost estimate, took a five-week estimate for their five-month estimate.
What should the number of drone losses actually be? If you compare the total aircraft inventory for the Air Force — this is a list published each year as part of the Air Force budget request — in June 2025, as part of their 2026 request, the Pentagon said it would have 189 MQ-9 drones in its inventory at the end of fiscal year 2026. The next year, this past April, they said the enacted amount was down to 165. So that explains a 24-drone difference. But in May, an Air Force general testified before a Senate subcommittee and said the MQ-9 fleet, due to wartime losses, was down to roughly 135. So either way, we're looking at an estimate for MQ-9 drones that is 100% off. It should have been twice as much.
Tucker Carlson: Did anybody else reverse-engineer it like you did?
Israel Stephen Semler: To my knowledge, no.
Tucker Carlson: Right. So you're just one guy in Pittsburgh — "let's look at how they got to this number" — and you find out it's 100% off just in this one category, one kind of drone.
Israel Stephen Semler: And I should say that for the most part, the CBO and I were working with the same amount of resources, because as the CBO notes in its report, the Pentagon didn't cooperate with their estimate. The CBO asked for numbers from the Pentagon, but the Pentagon just refused to provide them.
Tucker Carlson: How is it its own country? It gets to act independently.
Israel Stephen Semler: I suppose so. And from people I talked to on the Hill, I got two types of answers. One was that the Pentagon does this all the time. And the second version was that the Pentagon has done this in the past, and it's also worse than it's ever been in terms of stonewalling other agencies from access.
Tucker Carlson: Congress is just in full cuck mode — no self-respect whatsoever.
Israel Stephen Semler: The Pentagon has never passed an audit. Federal agencies were required in the mid-90s to pass an audit — to be able to produce accurate financial documents. In the private sector, a CEO of a private sector firm who does not produce accurate financial records goes to prison.
Tucker Carlson: Oh, absolutely.
Israel Stephen Semler: So I'm thinking — why not have the same standards for the heads of government agencies?
Tucker Carlson: Well, but also the only enforcement mechanism really is the legislative branch — the Congress, the co-equal branch of government, one of three. And if they don't assert that privilege, if they don't use their power, then it just goes away. So what's their problem? Why is it so hard for Congress to just use the power it was given by the Constitution to make the country better?
Israel Stephen Semler: I think it has a lot to do with what we were discussing earlier about the influence. But also — the CBO, again, under their lists of equipment losses, didn't include an MH-60 helicopter that crashed in the Arabian Sea as part of Iran war operations in early July. Understandable, you might think — except it actually did make headlines. One of the crew members died and there was a search for him. It was covered by independent media and by the New York Times as well. So it got enough press attention. I just detected a level of effort that I wasn't really happy with.
It also refused to assign a cost to the bases that are now, in some cases, beyond repair — that the US has basically lost and abandoned in the Middle East. We're told not to complain about the cost of maintaining this archipelago of bases across the Middle East because it provides immeasurable economic benefits. But when we lose one of those bases, we can't even write off the cost — which strikes me as a bizarre choice.
The CBO also didn't bother asking about the cost to other agencies, even though the State Department spent around $80 million evacuating personnel across the world and suffered around $100 million in damaged diplomatic facilities as a result of the war.
But the main reason I believe there was such a huge discrepancy between the internal Pentagon budget estimates — around $100 billion through the first 120 days — and my own, which also arrived around $100 billion, versus the CBO's $38 billion, is that the CBO, when it calculates costs for anything including war, does so in relationship to a certain funding baseline. So it's not measuring how much the US spent on a war per se. It's measuring how much more the US spent in comparison to a pre-existing baseline — how much the Pentagon spent above its normal operating budget.
Now, the problem is the normal operating budget. Whenever you measure war costs, you obviously want to separate the peacetime cost that would have been incurred anyway from the additional costs from the war. Fair enough — I do that too in my own estimates. The problem is it matters a lot which budget and which funding baseline you choose to represent the peacetime budget. When the CBO made its calculation, it was able to write off a huge amount of costs because they were "already included in the DoD budget." And the amount of money in the DoD budget is the historical amount — that $1.1 trillion we were just talking about, which is the largest since 1945. On average, it exceeds — adjusted for inflation — the average amount the US spent on its military each year from 1942 to 1945 by about $90 billion.
Tucker Carlson: Wait — it's more on average per year than we spent during World War II?
Israel Stephen Semler: Yes.
Tucker Carlson: Oh, come on.
Israel Stephen Semler: Yeah.
Tucker Carlson: Our current budget — adjusted for inflation.
Israel Stephen Semler: Are you sure?
Tucker Carlson: Yes. Now, granted, the spending during World War II occupied a much greater share of the US economy because the US economy was a lot smaller back then and the US had a smaller population as well. But in terms of inflation-adjusted dollars —
Israel Stephen Semler: We're spending more now than we spent during World War II — on average from 1942 to 1945. Yeah.
Tucker Carlson: Those are the war years — Pearl Harbor was the very end of '41. I just want to specify that wasn't including the lower cost of 1941.
Israel Stephen Semler: Yeah. And the proposed budget for next year that Trump proposed is $1.5 trillion.
Tucker Carlson: You've blown my mind. It's passed so swiftly with bipartisan appeal — because the war costs from World War II are very famous. Those costs transformed the US economy for generations. Everything about it was at massive scale.
Israel Stephen Semler: Yeah. And I'm not disputing that at all. If you measure it as a percentage of GDP, it was much higher in World War II because the economy was smaller.
US Aid to Israel and the Cost of Defending Israeli Territory
Tucker Carlson: Well, yeah. I get it. But in absolute inflation-adjusted dollars, we're spending more now. Even if you take away all the propaganda about World War II — just consider the scale of what those dollars achieved between 1942 and 1945. It's kind of crazy how little we're achieving, even if you disagree with the goal. With $1.1 trillion.
Israel Stephen Semler: Right. And these numbers come from the Office of Management and Budget — the White House office where all these historical records are kept. But even if you look at it — I went back when I was doing my analysis of polling data that we discussed earlier, looking at polling from the 1940s on wars, but also looking at budget documents and congressional discourse. And the difference between then and now — one of the main things that stood out to me, Tucker, is that members of Congress were openly acknowledging that this is an absurd amount we're spending. This was during World War II. But it's necessary, and this is going to be wasteful, and after this war is done, we're going to rescind all the money that was approved that wasn't spent. We're going to take it back. And there was a rescissions bill — that's how you do it — and there was at least one massive one after World War II that took this money back. But the difference now is that this is just normal. And it was reflected in the CBO's estimate by adopting this baseline. Maybe they were locked into it — maybe that's a constraint the CBO has to abide by, the most recent fiscal year funding projections. And if it happens to be the largest military budget since World War II, then so be it. But I just feel like their estimate is detached from reality because they're more concerned about abiding by their budget model, which I think was disconnected from reality.
Tucker Carlson: So if you're spending that much money in an agency that has never passed an audit, and there's no obvious sign of what you're getting — it's not like you're paying for a World War II-size military, because we're not. The military in number of personnel is lower. And the quality is obviously lower in some ways. You could be paying for a lot of stuff that people would have no idea even existed. The Pentagon budget's a great place to hide all kinds of projects that have nothing to do with national defense.
Israel Stephen Semler: Oh yeah. The Pentagon budget is a great place to hide money, intentionally or unintentionally as well.
And I think the way we get this back under control — the Pentagon has never passed an audit. It's been forced to conduct audits over the last seven or eight years, and each year it claims it's made progress. They claim they're able to account for a slightly higher percentage of their assets and budgetary resources than the year before. But the amount — the value of the assets they're unable to account for — increases every year because their budget goes up. So even if they make progress in terms of the percentage of their budget they're able to account for, the objective resources they just cannot provide proper documentation for keeps going up.
When was the last time an American general officer went to jail for corruption? Have you heard of that happening?
Tucker Carlson: No.
Israel Stephen Semler: I haven't either. Have you ever heard of the head of a weapons manufacturer going to jail for corruption?
Tucker Carlson: I haven't heard that either. Ever?
Israel Stephen Semler: Yeah, I haven't either. It's kind of weird. That's one of the stories I've never seen.
Tucker Carlson: I'm sure there is one. With $1.1 trillion a year flowing through the system and producing results that are so embarrassing — the failure is so obvious — they're literally just like, "We're going to use nukes because there's no other way out."
Israel Stephen Semler: That's where they are. And there's nothing stopping it. It's like the decision to go to war — there's just nothing stopping it. I think if Congress was really interested in getting the Pentagon to pass an audit, you threaten its budget in a serious way. You cut its budget so it has less stuff to track. Or my preference, as a first step, is to introduce legislation that's like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act for the private sector — where CEOs who produced inaccurate financial records would go to prison. Why not a Sarbanes-Oxley Act for the Pentagon or other government agencies?
Tucker Carlson: Or just apply the federal anti-corruption statutes evenly across the board.
Israel Stephen Semler: Yeah. Reform begins with ending corruption. That's widely understood, universally understood. When the new president of El Salvador took the country from a state of war for 40 years and tried to make it a peaceful modern country, the first thing he did was send his own employees — including his own cabinet ministers — to jail for corruption when they committed it. And that goes a long way. But that's never happened, as far as you know.
Tucker Carlson: Wouldn't that be something if the next administration decided to prosecute Trump and Biden administration officials — well, just if you commit a crime. Why do you get a special pass? I don't really get it. If I commit a crime, I fully expect to go to jail for it. I try not to, for that reason.
Interesting. Okay. So now — I'm sorry, I forgot the category you had for it — the costs of the war that are not directly related to congressional appropriations.
Israel Stephen Semler: Yeah, non-budget. So that includes even stuff that is budget-related but is longer-term, like veterans' care, for example.
Tucker Carlson: Okay.
Israel Stephen Semler: Each US troop that is killed or disabled just creates a ripple effect of money — which I think is obvious, and I think the US should properly compensate veterans.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah, it's the deal.
Israel Stephen Semler: But it's a cost that's not talked about immediately. The best resource for this is a Harvard professor called Linda Bilmes, who will probably have a report on this coming out soon. She and an economist called Joseph Stiglitz wrote a very influential book on the cost of the Iraq war called The Three Trillion Dollar War.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah, famous book.
Israel Stephen Semler: That greatly influenced my thinking and my methodological approach. That book does a great job of explaining how the costs of just one injury sets off decades of costs.
Tucker Carlson: How many veterans do you know on disability?
Israel Stephen Semler: All of them. Yeah.
Tucker Carlson: I don't think I've ever met one who wasn't on disability. I'm not begrudging them disability. I'm just saying it's a fact that almost every single person I know who served in the US military is continuing to receive money from the VA. And so that's a huge cost.
Israel Stephen Semler: I'm not saying they don't deserve it. I'm not saying it's fraud. I'm just saying it's real. That's all I'm saying.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah. And it's not talked about. And it's hard to project, too. But it's a rule of thumb that the costs of war — current and future — are always underestimated.
Israel Stephen Semler: So what do you think those costs are likely to look like if the Iraq war is any guide?
Tucker Carlson: In terms of the all-encompassing costs — the Iraq war, we can say, is $3 trillion.
Israel Stephen Semler: No, it's more by this point. That was the estimate as of 2008. It's grown since. The Cost of War Project at Brown does fabulous work. The cost of the post-9/11 wars is several trillion dollars above $3 trillion — well above. I think it's like $6 to $7 trillion. The cost just spirals so quickly. And again, we're not measuring the cost to consumers. So it's a double whammy — the cost to us as taxpayers, but not the cost as consumers.
Tucker Carlson: What would you do for the country with that much money? Maybe it wouldn't be falling apart like it is.
Israel Stephen Semler: Yeah, you could pretty much —
Tucker Carlson: Could we have nice airports?
Israel Stephen Semler: Yeah. The possibilities are pretty much endless. To end extreme poverty for a year — it's a fraction of that. It's very, very shocking. Whenever a project is proposed that promises to make the world better, you have to have an enormous amount of research and cost analysis backing it up, and you have to survive getting it through Congress through tons of political effort, and it rarely happens. But if you're in the arms industry, what you're promising is the absence of catastrophe. You're basically saying this has to happen for the sake of national security. And as a result, there's just not that much interest or inquiry into whether these purchases, this money and the stuff it buys, actually does what it says — because it's preventing a catastrophe instead of —
Tucker Carlson: You don't know how bad it could have been.
Israel Stephen Semler: Yeah. There could have been jihadis in bed with you. They could be beheading you right now.
Tucker Carlson: If we hadn't done what we did. So please say thank you.
Israel Stephen Semler: Exactly. And if that weapon system that we said is protecting you gets destroyed in the Iran war, you can't say it costs anything because it's already in our budget. So if you're the Pentagon, or a member of Congress taking money from the weapons manufacturers, or the weapons manufacturers themselves, and you're paying various think tanks to do intellectual research on issues — you've got a massive incentive to scare the crap out of the entire population at all times, to engender fear in order to receive compliance and money.
Tucker Carlson: Right. And I think the defining feature of the last election — and this one too — is about security. But it's not the security they're selling. The brand of national security they're selling, believed to be advanced through the use of military force — that's not what people are worried about. The security that people feel most acutely is like an uneven terrain they're on, where they are one financial slip-up or one accident away from — they're tight-rope walking over the abyss in terms of their financial security and their food security.
Israel Stephen Semler: So that's the security that I think is most at the forefront of people's minds. When people say they're concerned about the cost of living — and the cost of living has been the top issue among US voters since — referring again to The Economist/YouGov polling — they started asking about inflation and prices, in other words cost of living, in July 2022, on a near-weekly basis. In 116 of the 117 weeks prior to the 2024 election, that was the top issue — inflation and prices. And if you take the monthly aggregate, inflation and prices, cost of living, has been America's top issue since July 2022. It still is. So that's a bad sign for the Trump administration.
Tucker Carlson: Bad sign for sure. And they're about to get punished, I think. But who knows what'll happen.
Israel Stephen Semler: It doesn't look good. I think Republicans will get punished in the 2026 midterms in the same way Democrats did in 2024, because the two main issues that I think have the most political power and salience among the public are cost of living — economic security, which is one of the dimensions of human security, not national security, but the actual everyday security that people experience from the main threats that happen to them — and then cost of war as well. Because people viewed the Biden administration as more interested in aiding Israel, arming Israel, fighting wars on Israel's behalf, and sending money to Ukraine than the Biden administration was concerned about addressing the cost of living crisis at home. And that's going to be a major factor in the 2026 election.
Tucker Carlson: Sadly, they were correct in both cases.
Israel Stephen Semler: Yep. Yep.
Tucker Carlson: There's no daylight between the administrations on those two issues. What is — how much do you think the US has sent to Israel in recent years? Do you have a sense of that? There's so much lying on this topic, it's hard to know.
Israel Stephen Semler: Through 2025, the US has provided $352 billion in aid to Israel since its founding, since the 1950s. $352 billion.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah. Isn't it the size of New Jersey?
Israel Stephen Semler: It has about 9 million people. So I don't know how big New Jersey is.
Tucker Carlson: It's physically the size of New Jersey. Smaller population than New Jersey.
Israel Stephen Semler: And that's —
Tucker Carlson: That's crazy.
Israel Stephen Semler: So when we talk about the military aid that's provided each year, there's $3.3 billion provided through the State Department budget for what's called Foreign Military Financing. That's the program. It's basically a gift card for Israel and other countries as well to spend on US weapons. Israel is uniquely allowed to spend some of that money on its own weapons — buying from its own defense industry using US taxpayer dollars.
Tucker Carlson: The US government gives money to Israel, and Israel uses that money to buy weapons from American or Israeli manufacturers, and we say that's good for the US economy. That's basically —
Israel Stephen Semler: Yeah. Which I have a bit of a problem with.
Tucker Carlson: Why? If you're interested in — it sounds like an electric windmill kind of thing. We're paying to run it.
Israel Stephen Semler: If you're interested in creating jobs through public funds, through taxpayer dollars, if you want to get the most bang for your buck, you do pretty much anything besides military spending. It's the absolute worst way to create jobs.
Tucker Carlson: Run it through another country. Why wouldn't we just send the money to Lockheed then? What? We pretty much are. One stat — you brought up the economic benefits, or maybe I did — the jobs argument often comes up with military spending. We saw this a lot with the Biden administration sending massive amounts of military aid to Ukraine. "Oh, the money is being spent here. This is creating US jobs." The link between more military spending and more jobs is hazy at best. For example, in 1985, the US arms industry employed 3.1 million people. In 2021, the arms industry employed 1.1 million people. So a reduction of two million people in arms industry employment. Despite that — there's a two million drop in jobs — the military budget went up by $290 billion in real terms from 1985 to 2021. So despite a nearly $300 billion increase in the annual military budget from 1985 to 2021, there was a two million drop in arms industry employment.
Israel Stephen Semler: Did weapons get that much more expensive? How does that work?
Tucker Carlson: Yes, that's part of it. And then another part is just factors that affected every industry — the decline of manufacturing in the US — but also profit-driven interests as well. Arms companies' main concern is profit. So when that's their main concern, they're interested in cutting down the workforce as much as possible while still maintaining enough of a presence in congressional districts where they're able to say they create jobs. But through these cost-saving measures to boost profit and technological advances that affected every sector in terms of employment, the relationship between military spending and economic benefit is very, very shaky.
Israel Stephen Semler: It sounds inverse.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah. And it's also a sign — when you hear "oh, this creates jobs" — that's a tacit admission that their main justification, which is national security, isn't such a strong point. If they're making a jobs argument, it means their national security argument isn't holding up.
I'm a little confused by your Israel aid number. So $300-and-something billion —
Israel Stephen Semler: $350 billion in inflation-adjusted, constant terms, as of 2025. That excludes the $4 billion that was passed this year for 2026. That includes the $3.3 billion I mentioned for the gift card. So we're at around $360 billion thereabouts, because you have to adjust all past figures.
Tucker Carlson: So I was reliably informed more than once by Nikki Haley — who was literally a governor of a southern state called South Carolina — that we get a lot more from Israel than Israel gets from us.
Israel Stephen Semler: She's probably referring to private sector investment, but even that is way lopsided. The US invests way more in Israel than Israel invests in the US.
Tucker Carlson: So has the Israeli Treasury sent us over $360 billion? What is she talking about? Is it a hard-to-quantify moral victory that's just worth a lot?
Israel Stephen Semler: It's just best not to think about it, Tucker.
Tucker Carlson: I think you're right. It's in that category.
Israel Stephen Semler: Here's one thing though. When you count military aid — and military aid is most of that $352 to $360 billion I just talked about — military aid is a category that refers to a narrow set of goods and services provided to another country: training, equipment, for the most part. It doesn't include literally assisting a country militarily. So I just crunched the numbers on — since October 2023, the US fired an estimated 609 missile interceptors for the sole purpose of defending Israeli territory from incoming Iranian ballistic missiles and Houthi missiles.
Tucker Carlson: Is that the number?
Israel Stephen Semler: Yeah, I just calculated that yesterday for this show.
Tucker Carlson: You did?
Israel Stephen Semler: Yeah, it took forever.
Tucker Carlson: Why is no one else doing this? I'm sorry, I know I keep sidebarring you, but why is it up to you to do this? Where's everybody else?
Israel Stephen Semler: Some guy in Pittsburgh with an internet connection.
Tucker Carlson: You have a background worthy of your job. But I do think maybe we could have a think tank doing this, or the New York Times doing this, or how about the Congress of the United States doing this? Why is it up to you?
Israel Stephen Semler: I'm good at it, I'll admit that. There's a skill set required, but I think the main thing is just the effort. And I think there's a lot of calculated disinterest. It's Nikki Haley getting up there and saying "Israel gives us a lot more than we give them," and it's like, okay, I guess.
And actually, one of the most useful bits of information we got was from a Washington Post report back in May that said the US had fired over 200 THAAD interceptors since — Terminal High Altitude Area Defense — and then more than 100 of these Standard Missiles, which include the SM-3 and the SM-6, which operate at lower altitudes. The US has employed four types of interceptors since October 2023 to defend Israel. They are the SM-3 — which are $31 million each for fiscal year 2027, for any fact-checkers at home — and basically the only one that the US has to make space-based interceptions. Ballistic missiles launch, they go through a one-to-five minute boost phase, they leave the Earth's atmosphere, they travel in space for about 20 minutes or so, and then they come crashing down in a one-to-two minute window called the terminal phase. The middle part is called the midcourse phase. You have the most opportunities in the midcourse phase because it's about 20 minutes long — the longest of the three phases. The problem is you need an interceptor that's technologically advanced enough to reach outer space and intercept a missile in it. And in outer space, the ballistic missile is able to release decoys, chaff, balloons, because without resistance from the Earth's atmosphere, they just travel along at the same trajectory as the missile itself in this cloud of debris, which makes it extremely difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were.
The US fired 80 of these SM-3s at around $30 million a pop during the June 2025 war alone. And then the Post didn't give a breakdown for the other standard missiles, but it's been over 100 combined.
Tucker Carlson: How many of those were fired in defense of Israel during the last summer war?
Israel Stephen Semler: There were 80 SM-3s launched in defense of Israel during the June 2025 war, and then more than 150 THAADs also launched in defense of Israel during that war. So if you include all the documented use of these interceptors that the US has used not in defense of its own bases, but for the sole purpose of defense of Israel, from October 2023 through September 2026 — three years — you get 609.
Tucker Carlson: I've never received a thank-you note or really any expression of gratitude from anyone in that — enough, really. That's what we're told. It's really quite shocking. And actually, JD Vance had a slip-up where he kind of had an outburst where a reporter asked him about US support for Israel, and he corroborated the Washington Post report — the numbers I just mentioned, the more than 200 THAADs and the more than 100 standard missiles — were about two-thirds of all interceptors fired for defense of Israel. So that includes Israeli interceptors as well. The US shouldered around two-thirds of the missile defense burden for Israel during the 2026 war, and close to 70% during the 2025 war. And that's not factoring in the $500 million in missile defense aid the US has provided every year for Israel to buy its own interceptors. I haven't crunched those numbers yet. I was hoping to have it ready for the show. It just takes forever, man.
Israel Stephen Semler: That is just absolutely remarkable.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah. And wait — so $350 billion since its founding for a tiny country? That's got to be the largest source of income to the economy, right, over time? There's no oil or gas there —
Israel Stephen Semler: As far as I know, it's the largest cumulative amount the US has provided to any other country.
Tucker Carlson: Ever. Out of all countries.
Israel Stephen Semler: Yeah. And as far as waging war on another country's behalf — there are really three costs that I've only really done two of. I'm still calculating. So there's arming Israel — the aid we just talked about — and then there's directly defending Israel through the missile interceptors I just talked about.
I'm realizing now that I didn't include interceptions of Iranian drones and Houthi missiles too. I have to calculate those costs as well. And then there's the cost of just waging war on Israel's behalf, because this really is — I mean, you could argue there's no one single reason the US went to war, but strategically speaking, this war doesn't happen without Israel and without Israel's influence over the US government.
Tucker Carlson: Marco Rubio said it out loud.
Israel Stephen Semler: Yeah. Yeah. We followed Israel into this. And by the way, the Speaker of the House Mike Johnson also said that. And it's also true because I saw it. So maybe you support it, maybe you think that's great, maybe you don't. But that's just a fact that cannot be erased.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah. It's not for US interest. It's not America First.
Israel Stephen Semler: Which I still think that idea has a good amount of currency.
Tucker Carlson: America First.
Israel Stephen Semler: Yeah, of course. If implemented properly, you're talking about —
Tucker Carlson: It's called democracy. That's what democracy is. You serve on behalf of the citizens of your country. They own the country.
Israel Stephen Semler: I just caught myself over-intellectualizing that. Thanks for —
Tucker Carlson: No, but it's like it's the only legitimate basis of government in any system, including a monarchy. If a king rules on behalf of another kingdom, he's betraying his subjects. Lots of kings — no American wants to hear it — lots of kings are super popular, actually.
Israel Stephen Semler: Yeah. Some do a good job and they're really popular, and people who live there don't want to replace the king.
Tucker Carlson: Why is he popular? Because they think he's serving their interests. It's Kuwait First or Emirates First or whatever. But that's the only legitimate way to run a country, or a family, or a military, or a business.
Israel Stephen Semler: And it's painful being told the opposite.
Tucker Carlson: The leaders serve the people they lead. It's the difference between ruling and governing, really. And it's just a hell of a lot easier to rule.
Israel Stephen Semler: Yeah. But you can even rule with the people's interests in mind. You can still answer to people and pay attention to what people think. But with ruling — yeah, you could just wage wars on another country's behalf. You can direct funding to the exact companies you want. For all intents and purposes, you can.
Tucker Carlson: Well, then you have to ask — who's actually being oppressed here? Is it the long-suffering people of Iran, or Russia, or Vietnam, or Somalia, all these countries we've gone to war against or within their borders? I hope for liberation for everyone, but I see the American public as being oppressed by everything that you mentioned.
Israel Stephen Semler: I think workers across the world are being oppressed. I really think one of the main political conflicts going on now is workers versus the war profiteers and the warmongers. Regardless of how you define working class, if you're even vaguely within the bounds of reality, you recognize that working class well-being is acutely compromised when governments prioritize waging warfare over promoting the general welfare. And if you're not putting workers' interests first — the people who make your economy go — then you're going to run into some real problems electorally, if there's any semblance of democracy in your country.
Tucker Carlson: It's the oldest story there is. The king bankrupted his country through wars and got overthrown. Only in an ahistorical moment like this one are people rediscovering something that every empire has learned serially for millennia — the king bankrupts his country through hubris in war and gets overthrown, or his kids get overthrown. That's how you wreck your empire.
Do you think more people are starting to realize that, especially over these last couple of years?
Israel Stephen Semler: I think — I have not had a shallow conversation with anybody, including convenience store clerks, since COVID. I think America, for all of its many faults — many of which are on display and accelerating — I think people are way deeper than they were just a few years ago.
Tucker Carlson: You'd be at the airport and you'd hear people talking about celebrity news or something called People magazine — do you remember that? It chronicled the diet habits of actors. The whole thing was so absurd and frivolous and embarrassing, really. And now I feel like people have been forced to confront real topics. So yeah, I think people are starting to figure stuff out.
I've been thinking for months about how the public is perceiving the political elite broadly — the establishment, your average politician or head of state. An analogy occurred to me yesterday when I was boarding the plane here and the pilot was greeting people at the door of the airplane, just saying hi and hello. And I thought — what if that pilot was visibly wearing a parachute as he was bringing passengers onto his airplane about to fly?
Israel Stephen Semler: That is so good.
Tucker Carlson: And it's like — do I get one? Oh, no. No. Your seat's down there. Don't worry about it. But have a good flight.
Israel Stephen Semler: Okay. And I think that kind of harkens back to this quote I heard during the 2024 election — young people don't see real hope. They just see a dying empire led by bad people.
Oh, I have a stat for you. Want to hear it? So this is a poll taken in May 2026 — New York Times/Ipsos. It asked whether people somewhat support, somewhat oppose, or strongly oppose additional aid to Israel. Most people oppose it. 19% somewhat support, 38% strongly support. But it divides into a bunch of different categories — age, political affiliation, and so on. Among the survey respondents who did not vote in 2024, the most popular response was "strongly oppose additional aid to Israel." And 50% — half — of the people who did not vote in 2024 answered that they strongly oppose additional military and economic aid to Israel.
Tucker Carlson: Military aid or just aid?
Israel Stephen Semler: The question asked about additional military and economic aid.
So I think that's twofold. One is the atrocities in Gaza — the genocide — have become matters of fact at this point. As much as people really try to talk themselves out of that reality, it's a matter of fact. And also, Gaza is like the Schrödinger's cat of political issues. I don't know if you've noticed it, but on Twitter — particularly from this group I call "ALOTs," which is short for acrimonious liberals on Twitter — I will get yelled at if I bring up polling on Gaza in the 2024 election and how big an effect it had on Kamala Harris's loss. I'll be told, "Oh, Gaza didn't matter at all." And then in the next breath, sometimes from the same person: "Oh, well, the people who didn't vote in 2024 because of Gaza got what they deserved." So it occupies these two spaces — this is the most important issue, or this was a complete non-factor. People just really can't decide.
But I think it did matter. And I think the polling I just mentioned and a bunch of other polls suggest that it did matter too. But I also think it's about the interaction between putting another country — especially one committing war crimes on a near-daily basis — ahead of the interests of the people. And this is where the intersection between the cost of war and the cost of living crisis meets. It's not just the financial resources being dumped in — it's the political capital too. It's the attention.
Think about the one legislative priority that Joe Biden took out an Oval Office address to sell. It was the foreign aid bill that provided the record amount of aid to Israel — plus money for the war in Ukraine, and Pacific aid for Taiwan as well. It wasn't his infrastructure bill. It wasn't his massive Build Back Better plan that he devoted the most political capital to.
Tucker Carlson: I didn't remember that. That's amazing.
Israel Stephen Semler: That was the one bit of legislation that he decided was worthy of an Oval Office address to the nation to sell.
Tucker Carlson: Well, they've just given up on our population, on our country, on us. They're looting it now. And their parachute is crypto and another passport, and they're out. You sort of know that — they're not lashing themselves to the mast of the SS America.
Israel Stephen Semler: They've got their parachute on. For real. And I think we have every reason to be offended by that.
Tucker Carlson: Do you feel — since you look at polling so much — obviously the Republicans are going to get hurt. No party's ever earned it more, in my opinion. And it's exactly what you said hurt Kamala Harris. But even now, the connection between this foreign misadventure and their declining quality of life and standard of living — it's just one to one. Even I can understand that. No energy flows — like, you did this to me. I'm not voting for you. But I wonder how many people see this problem not simply as a Trump problem, a Republican problem, or a Kamala Harris problem or a Biden problem, but as a system problem — both parties. I hope a lot of people see it that way. That's my read on it.
Israel Stephen Semler: I think it is. Does polling suggest that? I'm still working through the data. I think I have too many projects going on, Tucker.
Tucker Carlson: You're doing a lot of math.
Israel Stephen Semler: Yeah. And it's not my nature to be this fastidious and this committed to really making sure everything's right. I never follow recipes to the letter. So I just don't make that good food, I guess. But for this, I'm just all about getting it right. And also, being independent means you've got a lot of freedom, but it also means you don't really have any institutional protection. So if I make a mistake — heaven forbid, one that turns out to be a cost estimate that's catastrophically wrong, or I misplace a decimal on some bill I'm summarizing — I have nothing really to protect me. And it's like being a sports writer. We always used to say when I worked at a newspaper that the sports writers have the hardest job because their readers know a lot about the topic. So if they made any mistakes — your readers, anyone who writes about something specific like this, are a self-selected group who come at it with prior knowledge.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah. So your readers — anybody who writes about something specific like this — your readers are a self-selected group who are coming at it with prior knowledge.
Israel Stephen Semler: Yeah. And I have some paid subscribers who are actually mentors of mine. And there are people I don't know — I get notes from people who are usually positive and who really, really know their stuff. I learn a lot from my readers.
The Iran War as a Systemic Problem and the Shift in Public Opinion on Israel
Tucker Carlson: You were asking about whether people view the Iran war as a system problem or as a partisan problem.
Israel Stephen Semler: I think the Iran war happens if Kamala Harris gets elected. I think it happens either way. I don't know if the war takes its exact shape, but the political establishment, the national security establishment, was just headed that way. And if you think back to this interview that Harris gave in October of 2024 where she was asked what's the biggest threat to America — if you look at polling, the most popular answer is always America itself. People always say America is the biggest threat to America. And then the next ones are Russia and China, for obvious reasons. Harris answered Iran as the biggest threat to the US. And she wouldn't have answered the same way had October 7th and the resulting genocide not happened. I can't believe that. So I feel like on —
Tucker Carlson: And when was this interview?
Israel Stephen Semler: October of 2024. And the percentage of Americans who would call Iran the top threat was still probably around four to 5%. But here was Kamala —
Tucker Carlson: Have you ever been mugged by a Persian?
Israel Stephen Semler: No.
Tucker Carlson: I haven't either. They've only just been extremely nice to me.
Israel Stephen Semler: I agree. I had breakfast with one this morning, actually. Went to Harvard — more literate than I am. It's not a low-IQ group. It's a very impressive group.
Tucker Carlson: Oh, it's always so embarrassing when a non-native English speaker speaks English better than you. It happens to me a lot.
Israel Stephen Semler: For sure. But it's just amazing that she could say that — that Iran was the biggest threat. She's being paid to say that, of course. And I really viewed her as — and I think she viewed herself too — as a continuation of the Biden administration. That's just the direction the national security establishment was going. It was just the march toward war. It was just escalating because the US decided — I felt that strongly. US foreign policy had always been deferential to Israel for the most part, but it wasn't really until October 2023 where I felt confident calling it "Israel First," because there were just no conditions on it. Not just the vast, historic amount of resources invested — arming Israel — but going back to the numbers with interceptors fired, directly defending Israel. The US did that a bit during the initial stages of the Gulf War with Scud missiles from Iraq, but this is just an entirely different level. Just overtly waging war on Israel's behalf too is just an obscene escalation.
Tucker Carlson: I've been on TV for 30 years. When October 7th happened, I don't think I criticized Israel a single time on camera. Not one time. And not just because I was hiding my true views — I had complicated views on it, but I wasn't mad about it. I didn't think it was a top priority issue. I just was like, there's a lot of things going on. Why am I going after Israel? I kind of liked the country. And there was just a massacre that took place on October —
Israel Stephen Semler: Of course.
Tucker Carlson: And there was that. I was highly offended by the murder of innocents in Israel. And I still am when I think about it. The anniversary was two weeks ago, and I was thinking about it. It's awful — killing girls at a concert. Come on. But the relationship between Israel and the United States — I always thought was poisonous, but I didn't think it was fatal, and I could just kind of ignore it. Which is what I did.
But it changed after that. It changed after the Hamas attacks in southern Israel that day. Our relationship with Israel changed. Our politicians changed. That's what I noticed. It was kind of crazy all of a sudden. You can see the historical foundation there — a buildup over time, this long-standing support for Israel, repeating these accents: "My support for Israel is iron." I just kind of ignored it.
Israel Stephen Semler: Yeah. It kind of became white noise to a point.
Tucker Carlson: I spoke at the Republican convention in 2024 for Trump, the night he was nominated. And I was, of course — I've had a lot of time to think about that in the last six months, since Trump has done things that I find so offensive I can't even control myself. I'm so upset about it. So I went and watched that speech. I was like, what did I say? I don't remember saying it. I didn't write it down. I don't remember what I said. So I watched. There were flags flying in the convention center at that convention — 2024. Israeli flags in an American presidential party nomination. And I honestly — I guess I noticed, I don't know. I don't remember noticing. You're right. It was white noise. I just kind of tweeted it out like, you know, you've got your Israel thing. You're pretty obsessed about Israel. Whatever. Have fun with your little Israel thing. At least that's how I thought of it.
I was totally wrong. I didn't realize it was $350 billion. I had no idea.
Israel Stephen Semler: It became impossible to ignore.
Tucker Carlson: Well, that's it. Yeah. Exactly. And I really think the main driver for the change in public opinion on Israel has been morally based. And I think opposition to US policy toward Israel would even be higher if people actually knew the true costs — if the government actually bothered to investigate the atrocities being carried out with US weapons.
Tucker Carlson: Well, can I say — I never recommend Wikipedia for anything. It's controlled by the intel agencies, foreign and domestic. Everything about it offends me. But the Wikipedia entry on Gaza — which is probably the most contested entry on the entire site — read all those warnings at the top. But because it's so contested, I think you can look at it with some confidence, at least for an overview. Read the Wikipedia entry on Gaza, on what's happened since October 7th, and it's bracing. You can't dismiss it as Israeli propaganda. You can't dismiss it as third-world leftist propaganda. It's hard to dismiss.
Israel Stephen Semler: Yeah. I think this is a reckoning that's coming for the political establishment as well. Initially, opposition to the genocide in Gaza was like, "Oh, this is just people on the left, totally third-worlders." And you know, rich kids yelling at us from their dad's company car on TikTok. But no — the call was coming from inside the house, very much so. These are the base. These are voters.
Tucker Carlson: I kind of ignored it. I'm so embarrassed to say that, but I did. I was like, I don't get involved in that stuff. It's not my business. I'm sure Israel's mistreating the Palestinians — they certainly have before — but I'm not getting involved. I thought that when the Gaza stuff first started. I'm embarrassed, but I did. Was there a defining moment where you felt —
Israel Stephen Semler: Two churches. And I was like —
Tucker Carlson: Oh, I remember that.
Israel Stephen Semler: And it was nothing compared to what they did to the rest of Gaza, and I'm not making the case that only Christians are worth defending. But I mentioned it to some evangelicals — not on camera, just in private — and I said something about it and they were like, "Shut up." Like, no — Christian churches, your faith, their churches are blown up.
Tucker Carlson: It's like, how do you not feel connection to that person?
Israel Stephen Semler: Shut up.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah.
Israel Stephen Semler: This is the weirdest thing I've ever heard.
Tucker Carlson: Did they also have their fingers plugged into their ears going, "No, no, no, no"?
Israel Stephen Semler: No — they hated me. They hated me for saying it. I was actually on stage giving a speech about something else, and I got a question from an audience member, and I said, "What's that?" And they shuffled me off stage. True story. So that actually changed my view. Whenever someone says "we don't want to hear it" and it's true — I wasn't speculating, and I wasn't even getting that assertive or strident about it. I was like, well, you know, you're Christians, you should care about the bombing of a church. "Shut up."
It was Catholic Relief Services, a humanitarian group, and a couple of other faith-based organizations in the Christian denomination that reported on it. And then I went right down the rabbit hole and started talking to people. I spent time in the Middle East, so I called people I knew. And then I realized — wow, this is like the worst thing ever. But I had almost fully ignored it for about a year. And I'm not proud of that at all. But I did. So anyway — not ignoring it now, because that's impossible to ignore.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah. And the attacks on Christian centers in southern Lebanon, and attacks on all people in Lebanon.
Israel Stephen Semler: Well, that is one of the most upsetting things. Using the war that Israel pushed Trump — its proxy — into starting, using that war as cover to just grab southern Lebanon south of the river — that's one of the worst. And then bombing Beirut, where you used to live.
Tucker Carlson: That's — you feel that in your soul. You really do. One of the things I'm going to look at for a project is — you mentioned grabbing land. I think ultimately this is about land. It's about grabbing land. And I'm going to compare — teach myself how to use satellite imagery, or maybe just something rudimentary like Google Maps — and outline a pre-October 2023 map and compare it to the 1967 borders as well. Just compare the shift in the amount of territory that Israel occupies — not only in Gaza, but more in the West Bank, more in southern Syria, southern Lebanon as well. I just want to quantify how much of a land grab is happening. I'm unaware of anyone else who has done it. I hope someone has.
Israel Stephen Semler: Do you know anyone who's done reliable, factually accurate analyses of what's happened in Gaza?
Tucker Carlson: On what level?
Israel Stephen Semler: How many people killed? Let's just start there.
Tucker Carlson: You know, honestly, the best numbers come from the Gaza Ministry of Health. And obviously the US media decided early on this is going to be Hamas-run. But it's the Hamas government — these are just civil servants. They're not in the army.
Israel Stephen Semler: But the most reliable figures are the verified figures coming from the Gaza Ministry of Health ultimately. And international organizations can do their best to cross-reference and verify, but everyone's ultimately leaning on that. Even Israeli intelligence agencies have admitted that they use Gaza Ministry numbers.
So in terms of people I listen to — Karim Makdisi and his brothers, who have the podcast called Makdisi Street. Karim Makdisi was a professor at AUB — I think he still is.
Tucker Carlson: American University of Beirut.
Israel Stephen Semler: Right, where I was. Excellent resource. UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese.
Tucker Carlson: Nice woman.
Israel Stephen Semler: Have you met her?
Tucker Carlson: Yeah.
Israel Stephen Semler: Oh, cool. That's probably actually one person I was just extremely excited to meet. Noura Erakat as well, who's a law professor at Rutgers, I believe. Those are just a couple off the top of my head, but there are a hell of a lot of people doing good work on this. I've just thought about Gaza pretty much every day for the last three years. It wears on you a bit. It's not out of some weird obsession — it's just that the feeling of ignoring it would be far worse than having it at the forefront.
Tucker Carlson: You can't unsee it.
Israel Stephen Semler: Yeah. Yeah.
Tucker Carlson: Israel Stephen Semler, I really appreciate all the time you spent, and particularly the numbers. Will you restate one last time where people can follow you, in case they didn't catch it?
Israel Stephen Semler: Best place is to follow my newsletter on Substack. That's where you hear about everything I'm up to, and that's the main vehicle for publication. It's called Polygraph, and you can find it on Substack at stephensembler.com.
Tucker Carlson: I love it. Thank you.
Israel Stephen Semler: Thank you, Tucker.