Stephen Semler Interview: Poverty and Inflation Crush Americans – Tucker Carlson Show – The Singju Post

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In this Tucker Carlson Show interview, defense budget analyst Stephen Semler, author of the Polygraph newsletter on Substack, explains why the Iran War is the most unpopular U.S. war since polling began and what it is really costing American taxpayers. Semler breaks down the $1.1 trillion military budget, the flaws in the Congressional Budget Office’s Iran War cost estimate, the $352 billion in U.S. aid to Israel, and how war spending is feeding the inflation and cost-of-living crisis crushing American households. Read the full transcript of this interview which was premiered on October 23, 2026, below:
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:00:04 – 00:00:48) Stephen Semler, thank you very much for coming on. So 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 this, that, or the other, 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, pretty hard actually. And you are probably the most famous person who keeps track. So thank you very much for doing this.
So let me just ask you, let’s start with the Iran War and its popularity. So democracy kind of demands if you’re going to do big things that you’ve got public buy-in because you’re doing it on behalf of the public, purportedly. How is this war viewed by the public in the United States?
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:00:49 – 00:00:52) It’s the most unpopular war since polling began.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:00:53 – 00:00:53) Really?
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:00:53 – 00:00:54) Yeah.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:00:55 – 00:00:55) Wow.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:00:55 – 00:01:21) The first poll, according to this joint poll that was, 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 net 13% net support, which means that 13% more people, 13 percentage points more people opposed the war than supported it.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:01:21 – 00:01:24) So most Americans opposed the war the day it started.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:01:24 – 00:01:26) From the jump. 13% plus. You
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:01:26 – 00:01:35) just stop there. Is that’s I mean that itself is unusual, right? Because if memory serves, when wars start with fireworks and flags and all that, most people are kind of all in,
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:01:36 – 00:01:38) right? It’s sort of cathartic at the beginning.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:01:38 – 00:01:38) Exactly.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:01:39 – 00:01:50) 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 crazy like 95%, 95% support something like that.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:01:51 – 00:01:53) But over even the Iraq War in 2003,
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:01:54 – 00:01:57) yeah, that started off its. I believe plus 40% or something.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:01:57 – 00:01:59) Is that true? Wow, I forgot that. Okay.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:02:00 – 00:02:04) And the Afghanistan War even higher. And of course those have tumbled down over time.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:02:04 – 00:02:04) Oh yeah.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:02:05 – 00:02:28) But the point is that all U.S. wars, major 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. So at the time of we’re having this conversation, according to the latest data, it’s at -35 net support.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:02:28 – 00:02:29) -35.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:02:29 – 00:02:33) Yeah. And for context, that makes it the most unpopular war ever.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:02:33 – 00:02:39) I bet, I’m not an epidemiologist, but I bet there are diseases with higher ratings than that.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:02:40 – 00:03:16) Yeah, I would assume so. I mean, it’s a near universally unpopular policy. And even if you look at, there’s always additional related or wrong or questions on this poll that you don’t get from the summary sheet, but you have to actually dig through the data looking at the individual questions and the responses, is that even if you, even among the people who still support the war, say it was the right decision, about half of them want it to end as quickly as possible.
So they won’t really admit that it was the wrong decision, but that yet, say, “Should we end it as quickly as possible?” “Yes, absolutely.”
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:03:16 – 00:03:17) “I love this. I hope it’s over soon.”
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:03:18 – 00:03:18) Yes,
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:03:19 – 00:03:20) yes, yes, right.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:03:20 – 00:03:25) “I really think it was a great decision. Can it end? We needed it to end yesterday.”
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:03:25 – 00:03:48) Yeah, exactly. Okay, well, that’s really interesting. I sense that— I mean, 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.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:03:49 – 00:04:15) Yeah, there was a steady buildup of military assets, but they didn’t prime— 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. It seemed even though there was this 1 or 2 month long buildup, and then there was, the last June there was the attack by the US on Iranian nuclear facilities, I believe on June 21st, 2025.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:04:15 – 00:04:16) That’s correct.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:04:16 – 00:04:39) And then there’s, of course, that history that had built up.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:04:40 – 00:04:40) Yeah.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:04:40 – 00:05:22) 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 just basically go to war outside of congressional opinion, outside of congressional approval rather, as required by law, and they find legal justifications to kind of work their way around it.
And the worst part is Congress really, for the most part, isn’t interested in holding isn’t interested in constraining presidential decisions. So why the U.S. went to war with Iran— multiple reasons we can discuss, but I think one of the main reasons was there’s nothing stopping it,
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:05:22 – 00:05:23) right?
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:05:23 – 00:05:25) There’s no institutional pushback from Congress, which is—
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:05:26 – 00:05:28) even from the opposition party,
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:05:29 – 00:05:29) there was.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:05:29 – 00:05:39) So Chuck Schumer hasn’t demanded a congressional resolution declaring war on Iran, even though we’ve been in war with Iran since February 28th.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:05:39 – 00:05:52) They’ve introduced a lot of war powers resolutions. What the problem I have with Democrats, among them, among many, is they refuse to take on the budgets that enable wars in the first place.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:05:52 – 00:05:53) Well, exactly.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:05:53 – 00:06:32) So we have all these symbolic votes of non-binding resolutions that would ostensibly order Trump to withdraw all troops from the Middle East who are engaged in hostilities with Iran. But Democrats are very, aside from a very select number of Democrats, and then on the opposite side, a very small, an even smaller number of Republicans who are actually willing to take on the military budget.
So I think Democrats realize there’s a lot of currency and there’s a lot of 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.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:06:34 – 00:06:52) So let’s talk about that budget. The defense budget, or I guess now it’s called the war budget because it’s the War Department, has grown at higher than the rate of inflation, which is saying a lot. So where are we now on the defense budget?
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:06:52 – 00:07:04) 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 this it’s called a continuing resolution, just continues the levels.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:07:05 – 00:07:06) $1.1 trillion.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:07:06 – 00:07:24) Yes, that includes the— that’s the base budget that’s enacted every year, plus it’s 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 Trump— the second Trump administration.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:07:25 – 00:07:34) So I— too little attention is paid to this. So $1.1 trillion, so that’s by far the largest, just piece of the discretionary budget. I mean, nothing even comes close. That’s the majority of the discretionary budget as far as I know.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:07:35 – 00:07:43) Oh yeah. It’s— I mean, every year the budget that Congress votes on, military spending occupies more than half of it.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:07:43 – 00:07:43) Yeah,
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:07:43 – 00:07:44) yeah,
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:07:44 – 00:07:49) right. So the rest being the, what we call entitlements, or things that just keep going until the government goes bankrupt.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:07:49 – 00:07:58) The discretionary budget is the one that the Congress votes on every year, and then entitlement spending the mandatory spending, as it were.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:07:58 – 00:07:58) Automatic. Yeah.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:07:59 – 00:09:01) Yeah. The stuff that operates basically as trust funds that keeps going regardless of whether the government is operating or whether we’re experiencing a shutdown is a separate amount that’s— that goes on automatically, as you said. But then there’s 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 of it.
And if you look at all U.S. government spending in a given year, military spending, if you include the mandatory resources included, you’re getting to about a third. And if you include militarized domestic security, like domestic security apparatuses, it’s, 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 is on war and policing, effectively.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:09:01 – 00:09:34) Yeah. How’s that going? Well, so actually, how is it going? So $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 are, we’re told, this primitive, goat-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, trying not to use profanity here, what is this for?
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:09:35 – 00:09:42) Well, one way to answer that question is that more than half of the annual military budget goes to for-profit contractors.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:09:43 – 00:10:41) But for $1.1 trillion, you could just buy Yemen. No, I’m serious. You could buy the country, which apparently I’ve never been.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:10:42 – 00:10:45) Yeah, the military budget is large. I mean, it’s larger than the economies of a lot of countries.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:10:45 – 00:11:02) Of most countries. Yeah. $1.1 trillion. Yeah. There’s no African country with a $1.1 trillion GDP. So why wouldn’t you just— why wouldn’t you buy Yemen? What is the point here? Is it to enrich Boeing? Is that—
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:11:03 – 00:11:38) to me, it’s— if you want to look at it through a lens of okay, how the military-industrial complex operates. It gets an enormous amount of money through the annual military budget. That money flows into obviously profits and shareholders and executive pay. The executives at the top weapons manufacturers who get the majority of their revenue from the U.S. 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, like
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:11:38 – 00:11:40) they’re making $30 million a year.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:11:40 – 00:11:47) Yeah. Top executives are. Yeah. Boeing, Lockheed, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:11:48 – 00:11:48) Wow.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:11:48 – 00:12:04) Might have said that already. But 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 is the funding of think tanks in Washington, D.C.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:12:05 – 00:12:05) Oh, I’ve noticed.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:12:05 – 00:12:30) Which gives them who produce reports that are not objectively PR material, but they fall within a certain spectrum that is allowable for the arms industry. So it gives arms industry interests a certain, 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: (00:12:30 – 00:12:35) So you send money to AEI or Heritage or Brookings.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:12:35 – 00:13:23) I’ll give you an example. So CSIS, Center for Strategic and International Studies is a very establishment-y think tank. I think Henry Kissinger was on the board there at some point or whatever. And 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.
So raising that alarm, and again, it’s justifiably so, the US has burned an enormous amount of munitions in Iran. That helps create a demand to buy more weapons, as the war itself has. But they will also—
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:13:24 – 00:13:27) it’s like you need new toner cartridges.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:13:27 – 00:13:28) Yes, yes.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:13:28 – 00:13:36) You’ve bought the hardware, but the actual profit is on the toner cartridges, the oil changes, the munitions, the stuff that you have to keep buying.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:13:36 – 00:13:56) And they really, 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. So the US is experiencing a shortfall in missile interceptors. Interceptors are missiles that shoot down other missiles.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:13:57 – 00:13:57) Yes,
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:13:57 – 00:14:28) everyone I think is aware of it at this point. But the US has burned such vast quantities of these interceptors during the Iran War that 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 very—
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:14:28 – 00:14:31) Wait, so pointless wars are tough on your munitions stockpiles? Is that what you’re saying?
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:14:31 – 00:14:36) Tucker, it turns out that that to be the case. I know this is shocking to some people, but we’re getting these 12—
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:14:36 – 00:14:37) Do you have a PhD? How’d you know that?
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:14:37 – 00:14:56) Oh yeah. I just, yeah, it was just years of intensive study. But the important thing is that people who do have PhDs are developing these 20-page reports on how to replenish the stockpiles, but not really calling for an explicit end to the Iran war. So they’re just saying, really tinkering around with, oh, production schedules and
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:14:56 – 00:14:56) yeah,
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:14:57 – 00:15:33) “How can we increase the yearly production capacity from the projected 650 Patriot interceptors in fiscal year 2027 to get it 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?” Like, 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. So that’s the kind of analysis you get when, even when it comes to a very narrow subject like missile, like rebuilding the inventory.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:15:33 – 00:15:57) So this is part of their lobbying budget. Lockheed, for example, it’s just to pick one, would spend, it’s the money it gets from the government building the weapons that it has sold to the government, of course, and employing its workforce and all that. But then part of the money would go to lobbying either directly or influence campaigns laundered through so-called think tanks.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:15:57 – 00:16:47) Yep. Spend money on advertising too. One thing that I’ve tracked over the years, and this is, I run this newsletter called Polygraph on Substack, and one of the main things that I do is I state the obvious, but in a very, very specific way. So for example, 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, is that the members of Congress who receive more money from arms companies, military contractors, are more likely to vote for the military budget and military budget increases. Oh wow, really? Yeah. So
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:16:47 – 00:16:48) there’s cause and effect.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:16:48 – 00:16:51) There’s at least a correlation. And I—
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:16:52 – 00:16:53) oh, but correlation does not cause—
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:16:53 – 00:17:46) when people say duh, I say, yeah, I’m not surprised either. But when we talk about money in politics, the first answer, people say, “Oh, well, everyone knows that 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 about it.”
It’s like here, if every year I’m noticing that members of Congress who vote for a military spending increase take 3 to 5 times more arms industry cash than members opposed to military spending increases, then we’ve moved the conversation away where suddenly for people who care about the effect of money in politics, we’re suddenly now on the offensive because now members of Congress have to say, okay, this correlation exists now.
So, and you’re part of this group who on average takes 3 to 5 times more money from the companies that profit from war, and you’ve just voted for a record amount of military spending.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:17:46 – 00:18:12) Well, yeah, especially considering the use of these weapons. I mean, it’s one thing if we’re defending the homeland against a ground invasion from Paraguay or something, or any, 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 because why? It, right? There’s no justification for any of it. It’s repulsive.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:18:13 – 00:18:24) Yeah, morally, I mean, I’m not going to— I don’t claim to be a moral authority. I can tell you how much it costs though. I can tell you as someone who’s followed these costs, it’s incredibly taxing on the conscience.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:18:24 – 00:18:35) Well, can I just ask too, unless I’m misunderstanding it, you’re saying that some of these, maybe all these weapons manufacturers derive most of their income and profits from the taxpayer?
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:18:36 – 00:19:11) The major ones, yes. So for example, Lockheed Martin last year, a couple years ago, received, I think, 73% of its income from DOD contracts, and then even more from U.S. government-brokered sales to foreign countries.
So all in all, when you combine the amount of revenue that Lockheed Martin received from government contracts plus the arms deals that were executed through the— arranged and executed through the US government, you’re talking about a company through which 97% of their revenue is tied to US government policy.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:19:11 – 00:19:27) I mean, they’re not an independent private company. They’re just working for US taxpayers who are their customer, their only real customer, right? Yeah. What you’re saying is they’re taking taxpayer money and using it to lobby taxpayers for more taxpayer money.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:19:27 – 00:19:29) This is how military speak.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:19:29 – 00:19:34) How is that allowed? So they take— if I don’t pay my taxes, I go to jail.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:19:34 – 00:19:34) Yeah,
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:19:35 – 00:19:56) they’re taking money from me at gunpoint, 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?
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:19:57 – 00:20:01) That’s a question you can ask in a lot of sectors as well. The difference is—
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:20:01 – 00:20:03) that’s right. Thank you for that, because that is true what you’re saying.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:20:03 – 00:20:13) It’s not just this sector, but the one thing that’s special to this sector is that we’re not talking— this is a state-run economy,
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:20:13 – 00:20:14) right?
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:20:14 – 00:21:03) Because I mean, it’s— when we talk about the US arms industry, it’s primarily— it’s a socialized system. It’s top-down. It’s about state planning. It’s about delegation. It’s about contracts. And members of Congress really like it because they can, they have with their districts, they have their own little fiefdom where they can direct government contracts how they like depending on, you have to usually hire lobbyists for this and they write legislation a certain way. So that narrows down the list of eligible companies that can bid on a contract.
And then you kind of, you work your legislative magic to alter the text and the bills. So that you’re given a very high chance that one company is going to be able to carry out a certain project, and you know that company has links to your district as a member of Congress.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:21:03 – 00:21:13) So shipbuilding in Maine and Mississippi, munitions in Tennessee, aerospace in California. It’s like every state, every congressional district has a piece of this, correct?
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:21:13 – 00:23:09) Yeah. And through this process called, it’s either called political engineering or geographic engineering, that these arms companies deliberately spread out their assets to touch, quote unquote, “all”— as many congressional districts as possible. So when lobbyists, say, get together to keep afloat a dying and deeply fraudulent project like the Littoral Combat Ship, which was eventually just killed off in the last couple years, but in the early teens, is a huge problematic history.
And there’s this huge lobbying effort in the early and the mid-2010s 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 hulls of these ships because they were made of aluminum and not steel. And this massive amount of technical problems that this ship was just never going to deliver, and it’s obvious.
But there’s this huge lobbying effort where a group of lobbyists organized this lobbying effort where, I’m going to slip into the first person here because I was a part of this lobbying effort where we organized all of the suppliers, the contractors, and the subcontractors involved in the production of this, what John McCain called the “little crappy ship,” the LCS.
And we just developed a map in this huge spreadsheet of all the different areas that projects were related to and how many people it employed. So when we went to congressional offices to lobby for this project, there was eventually in the white paper that we provided some sort of national security justification, usually that we just grabbed from an arms industry funded think tank. And then, but the real line was, okay. And at the bottom it was just, “And by the way, this company employs 550 people in your district.”
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:23:10 – 00:24:07) Wait, so you were a lobbyist for this? So you’re like a whistleblower, basically?
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:24:07 – 00:24:17) No, I was a very small part. I, it’s a very small cog in the machine, but I gained enough understanding to— I gained enough knowledge to get an understanding of how the system works.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:24:18 – 00:24:33) Were— from your exposure to the system from the inside, were people cynical about it? Did they think that what they were producing, these armaments, were going to make the world better, or was that not part of it?
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:24:34 – 00:25:09) I did get the feeling that they were, that some people I asked about, especially towards the end, because I mean, towards the end, obviously I developed, I figured out who I was and was basically just morally opposed to this through and through.
But when the subject came up, when I tried to bring it up indirectly, there’s, 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 that they were saying was less at me and more like reaffirmations for them.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:25:09 – 00:25:12) Yeah. “I’m good enough. I’m smart enough. And doggone it, people like me.”
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:25:12 – 00:25:21) Yeah. There’s a sense of entitlement. There’s a sense of— but also a moral component, too, that was just— it was odd to see them just—
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:25:21 – 00:25:24) “You know, Stephen, the world needs 2,000-pound bombs.”
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:25:24 – 00:25:37) Yes, yes, has to. And we’re helping, we’re helping delivering savings to the taxpayer by helping the F-35 stay funded even though it has tons of problems. But yeah, there’s a lot of—
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:25:38 – 00:25:43) how interesting. Well, I think it makes you much more credible that you have experience from the inside watching all this.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:25:44 – 00:25:44) Yes, trained by the best.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:25:46 – 00:25:53) So this defense budget, $1.1 trillion, that seems way higher than I remember it.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:25:53 – 00:26:34) Yeah. So in 2021, the military budget was $741 billion. This is in, I’m just going to say in nominal terms, because this is how Congress remembers these things, but a little bit higher if you adjust for inflation, much higher. But over time, I mean, by the time, well, that was when Biden entered office. And then when he left, it was, I think it was close. It was $850 or something. So it increased.
During 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.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:26:35 – 00:26:43) So basically everything Eisenhower warned about has come true. The defense industrial establishment has just eaten the country.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:26:44 – 00:27:29) Yeah, Eisenhower was worried about basically the war machine becoming sentient, this collection of interests would sort of not necessarily execute corruption in kind of the backfilled, smoke-filled rooms, 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. It’s insulated from the interests of everyone else.
And when, ideologies are here to stay. We’ve all got ideologies, you and I have them, of course. But when you start mixing in profit interests to decisions about especially war and peace and people’s security, I have a bit of a problem with that. I have a massive problem with that.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:27:30 – 00:27:36) Of course. Especially when it’s not even working. It’s not even achieving your stated aims.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:27:37 – 00:27:37) Right.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:27:37 – 00:27:52) Whether or not I agree with those aims, which I don’t, but even if I did, I would say, okay, 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?
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:27:52 – 00:28:57) Right. It’s one of these cases that we’re going to hear this 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.” It’s like, 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 in any sense, the rebuttal is, “Okay, well, this war is about preventing Iran from getting the nuclear weapon. So how much would you pay for Iran to not have the nuclear weapon?” Which is a false question.
It’s patently absurd because one, 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. I mean, if I were them, it would definitely heighten my interest in acquiring one.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:28:58 – 00:28:58) Iran’s getting a nuke.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:28:59 – 00:28:59) I think so.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:28:59 – 00:29:01) And by the end of this, there’ll be nothing we can do about it.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:29:02 – 00:29:11) Right. And maybe at that point, we’ll find it in ourselves to actually be honest negotiators to negotiate an arms control agreement. But
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:29:12 – 00:29:37) we had a war in June of 2025 that we were told ended their capacity to create nuclear weapons. And of course, those of us who were watching carefully knew it had nothing to do with nuclear weapons, and 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.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:29:37 – 00:30:53) 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 from it or entertainment when people are, most people are morally opposed to that sort of thing unless it’s absolutely necessary and actively undermining their material interests at home.
Because this war is, for the average person, it’s morally repugnant. It’s a betrayal of the campaign promises that Trump ran on.
And it’s also just in a material sense making their lives worse, both as a consumer because they’re paying for higher gas prices and higher prices for everything as a result of the inflationary war spike, but also as taxpayers as well because they’re on the hook for the bill that the Trump administration is about to send taxpayers to the war.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:30:53 – 00:32:29) So let’s discuss that. Let’s discuss the totality of the cost. And you— I think you just named the big drivers of the cost. It’s not simply the defense budget or whatever additional funding they’re going to require to backfill all the munitions that they blew doing what, I’m not sure, but it’s also the cost in inflation. Summarize and then dig into, if you would, the costs.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:32:30 – 00:35:24) So I pay attention to the narrow set of costs called direct war costs, which are 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. So there was a Moody’s analysis, I think, that found that the average household paid $2,000 more as a result of the war, due to, 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 and the U.S. government is supposed to faithfully report regarding the war’s current costs, especially the Pentagon, but the Pentagon has refused to provide those numbers. So that’s, they provide a top-line number that’s dubious. The most detail they’ve provided, at least publicly, is a summary table, which 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 or have— would have gone unused.
So that has opened up the space for independent analysts to assess the cost of the Iran War. And for the first 60 days of the Iran War, I estimated that it cost $72 billion in direct costs between operations, between replacing the munitions that were expended, damage to U.S. military bases, and military aid to Israel. So taking those costs into account, I arrived at $72 billion for the first 60 days.
Then that the next month, the Trump administration requested an $87 billion supplemental funding bill, which is literally money supplemental to the main budget that Congress approves every year for Iran, mostly for Iran war-related expenses. And according to the Cato Institute and others, people who have read the bill, this is the number I arrived at, it also included $72 billion for war-related costs.
And then for the next estimate I had over the, for 120 days, I arrived at $103 billion. And then a week later, there were 2 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 with the amount that the administration requested for the war. And then that was coming from internal Pentagon assessments through just the rank and file people who do the budget work there.
But then last month, or 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: (00:35:24 – 00:35:25) $38 billion.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:35:26 – 00:38:12) Shockingly low. So the Congress, and it became the authoritative war cost estimate because the Congressional Budget Office is a technocratic group that’s nonpartisan. Its job is to just to, it’s to assess the cost of legislation that Congress passes and various proposals and policies and that sort of thing. And because of that, they have, because of their technocratic remit on just crunching numbers and their nonpartisan status. The war cost assessment was treated as genuine.
But when I went through this, I mean, Tucker, I mean, the mistakes that were made in this report were just shocking, just basic matters of fact. For example, it put as under the equipment losses, it put that the U.S. had lost 24 MQ-9 Reaper drones. As of August 1st, this is a 5-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 report from CBS from an unnamed U.S. official from the first week of April regarding U.S. war losses. So effectively, the CBO for their official war cost estimate, or part of it, took a number of, for the number of drone losses, took a 5-week estimate for their 5-month estimate.
So what should the number, what should the number of drone losses should be for MQ-9s? If you compare the total aircraft inventory for the Air Force, total aircraft inventory is this list that’s published each year as part of the Air Force budget request. They give the amount that was enacted, their enacted inventory, the number of aircraft they have in each fleet for each respective unit, the amount they have enacted for that year, plus the amount that they want to have active for next year.
In June 2025, as part of their 2026 request, the Pentagon said it had— 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 that the Air Force said that the enacted amount was down to 165. So that explains the 24 drone difference.
But in May, an Air Force general testified before a Senate subcommittee and said that the MQ-9 fleet, due to wartime losses, was down to 135. So, or roughly 135. So either way, we’re looking at an estimate for, at least for MQ-9 drones, that is 100% off. It should have been twice as much as it was.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:38:14 – 00:38:34) Did anybody else— so CBO comes, Congressional Budget Office comes out with this $38 billion estimate for the cost of war, and it’s of course dutifully repeated by every news organization. I mean, that’s the point of CBO numbers is to get reporters to tell the public that they’re real. Did anybody reverse engineer it like you did?
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:38:35 – 00:38:35) To my knowledge, no.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:38:36 – 00:38:45) Right. So you’re just one guy in Pittsburgh who’s like, “Hmm, let’s look at how they got to this number.” And you find out it’s 100% off just in this one category. Yeah, one kind of drone.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:38:45 – 00:39:00) And I should say this, that for the most part, CBO and I were working with the same amount of resources because, as CBO notes in its report, the Pentagon didn’t cooperate with their estimates. So CBO asked for numbers from the Pentagon, but the Pentagon just refused to provide those numbers.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:39:00 – 00:39:03) Oh, is it its own country? It gets to act independently?
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:39:04 – 00:39:20) I suppose so. And from people I talked to on the Hill, it’s that the Pentagon— I got 2 types of answers. One was that the Pentagon does this all the time, and the second version was 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: (00:39:20 – 00:39:24) Congress is just in full cuck mode, no self-respect whatsoever.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:39:24 – 00:39:40) The Pentagon has never passed an audit. I mean, federal agencies were required in the mid-’90s to pass an audit to be able to produce accurate financial documents. And in the private sector, you go to a CEO of a private sector firm who does not produce accurate financial records goes to prison.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:39:40 – 00:39:41) Oh, absolutely.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:39:41 – 00:39:47) So I’m thinking, why not have the same standards for the heads of government agencies?
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:39:47 – 00:40:07) Well, but also the only enforcement mechanism really is the legislative branch, the Congress, the coequal branch of government, one of 3. 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 just to, I don’t know, use the power it was given by the Constitution to make the country better.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:40:07 – 00:40:12) I think it has a lot to do with what we were discussing earlier about the influence.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:40:12 – 00:40:13) God, they’re so craven.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:40:13 – 00:43:26) But it also— I mean, feel free to edit this out— the list of complaints goes on. I mean, CBO, again, under their lists of equipment losses, it didn’t include an MH-60 helicopter that crashed in the Arabian Sea as part of the Iran War operations in early July. Understandable though it didn’t make headlines. It actually did make headlines. I mean, the crash, I mean, made headlines. One of the crew members died and there’s a search for him.
It’s not just independent media. I mean, it was covered by independent media, was covered in New York Times as well, major organizations as well. So it got enough press attention. I just detected just 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 that, not to complain about war costs for maintaining this archipelago of bases across the Middle East. We’re told it’s in the interest of our security and that not to complain about the cost of maintaining them and conducting operations from them because it provides immeasurable economic benefits. But when we lose one of those bases, we can’t even write off the cost, which just strikes me as a bizarre choice.
It also didn’t— CBO didn’t bother asking about the cost to other agencies, even though the State Department spent, I think, 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 why I believe that there was such a huge discrepancy between the internal Pentagon budget estimates that were around $100 billion through the first, what did I say, 120 days, then my own draws around $100 billion, is that CBO, when it calculates costs for anything, but including war, it does so based 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 preexisting baseline. So it’s how much the Pentagon spent above its normal operating budget.
Now, the problem is the normal operating budget. And so let me back up. Whenever you measure war costs, you obviously want to separate the peacetime costs that would have been incurred anyway with the additional costs from the war. Fair enough. I get that. And 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.
So when CBO made its calculation, it was able to write off huge amount of costs because they were, quote unquote, “already included in the DOD budget.” And you can see this, this is throughout the report. But the amount of money in the DOD budget is the historical amount we were just talking about, that $1.1 trillion.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:43:26 – 00:43:26) Yes.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:43:27 – 00:43:41) Which is the largest since 1945. It’s 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. So
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:43:42 – 00:43:43) wait, it’s more
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:43:44 – 00:43:45) on average per year
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:43:46 – 00:43:47) than we spent during World War II?
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:43:48 – 00:43:48) Yes.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:43:49 – 00:43:50) Oh, come on.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:43:50 – 00:43:51) Yeah,
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:43:51 – 00:43:57) our current budget adjusted for inflation. Be sure.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:43:57 – 00:44:08) 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.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:44:08 – 00:44:09) Much smaller.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:44:09 – 00:44:15) But in terms of inflation-adjusted dollars, that’s what we’re talking about.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:44:15 – 00:44:19) We’re spending more now than we spent during World War II
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:44:19 – 00:44:23) on average from 1942 to 1945. Yeah. And the one point—
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:44:23 – 00:44:26) those are the war years because Pearl Harbor was the very end of ’41,
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:44:26 – 00:44:29) right? I just want to specify that wasn’t including the lower costs of—
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:44:29 – 00:44:31) no, I get it, right? Yeah, that’s—
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:44:31 – 00:44:34) yeah. And the proposed budget for next year that Trump proposed is $1.5 trillion.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:44:34 – 00:44:37) Why have I I know you’ve blown my mind.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:44:38 – 00:44:45) It’s because it’s passed so swiftly with bipartisan appeal because
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:44:45 – 00:44:59) the war costs from World War II are very famous. I mean, it had huge effects on the economy at both ends of the war. Of course, those costs transformed the US economy for generations. Everything about it was just at massive scale.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:44:59 – 00:45:05) 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.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:45:06 – 00:47:27) Well, yeah, I get it. But in absolute inflation-adjusted dollars, we’re spending more now. Even if you take away all the absurd propaganda about World War II, just the cheering for death and all this stuff, but just consider the scale of it, what those dollars achieved. Between 45, 42 and 45. It’s kind of crazy how little we’re achieving, even if you disagree with the goal.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:47:28 – 00:47:28) Yeah.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:47:29 – 00:47:30) And it’s $1.1 trillion,
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:47:30 – 00:49:17) right? And these numbers come from the Office of Management and Budget, which is the White House office where all these historical records are kept. But even if you look, that’s— I went back when I was doing my analysis of polling data that we discussed earlier about polling since I was looking at polling from the 1940s on wars, but I also was looking at budget documents too and congressional discourse. And there was the difference between then and now.
One of the main things that stood out to me, Tucker, is the members of Congress were openly acknowledging that this is an absurd amount that 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 was able for— that was made allowable for agencies to spend that wasn’t spent. We’re going to take it back.
And there was— there’s rescissions bill is how you do this, to rescind money. You introduce a bill that does this. And there was, I think at least one massive one after World War II that took this money back. But the difference now is that this is just normal now. And this, it was reflected in the CBO’s estimate by adopting this baseline.
And maybe they were locked into the, maybe that’s a constraint by CBO that they have 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 okay, so be it. But I’m just saying that because of that choice, I just feel like their estimate is detached from reality because they’re more concerned about abiding to their budget model, which I think was disconnected from reality.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:49:18 – 00:49:37) So if you’re spending that much money in an agency that has never passed an audit, as you said, and there’s no obvious sign of what you’re getting at all— it’s not like you’re paying a World War II-sized military because we’re not. The military, in number of personnel is lower.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:49:38 – 00:49:38) Yeah.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:49:39 – 00:49:52) 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. That would be— the Pentagon budget’s a great place to hide all kinds of projects that,
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:49:53 – 00:49:53) yeah,
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:49:53 – 00:49:55) nothing to do with national defense.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:49:55 – 00:50:43) 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— so the Pentagon has never passed an audit. It’s been actually forced to conduct audits over the last 7 or 8 years, and each year it claims, “Oh, we’ve made progress.” And they claim that, “Oh, we’re able to account for a slightly higher percentage of our assets and our budgetary resources than the year before.”
But the number, the amount, the value of the assets they’re unable to account for increases every year because their budget goes up. So even though, even if they make progress in terms of the percentage of their budget they’re able to account for, the objective resources that they just cannot provide proper documentation for keeps going up. So
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:50:43 – 00:50:51) this last time an American general officer went to jail for corruption, have you ever heard of that happening?
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:50:51 – 00:50:51) No,
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:50:52 – 00:50:57) I haven’t either. Have you ever heard of the head of a weapons manufacturer going to jail for corruption?
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:50:57 – 00:50:58) I haven’t heard that either.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:50:58 – 00:50:59) Ever.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:50:59 – 00:50:59) Yeah,
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:50:59 – 00:51:02) I haven’t either. It’s kind of weird. That’s one of those stories I’ve never seen.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:51:02 – 00:51:03) Yeah. And I was
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:51:03 – 00:51:18) thinking, I’m sure there isn’t any with $1.1 trillion a year flowing through the system that’s producing results that are so embarrassing. The failure is so obvious that they’re literally just, “We’re going to use nukes because there’s no other way out.” That’s where they are.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:51:18 – 00:51:53) And there’s no push. And it’s like the decision to go to the war. It’s like there’s just nothing stopping it. I think if Congress was really interested, if to get the Pentagon to pass an audit, you threaten its budget in a serious way, you cut its budget so there’s 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?
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:51:53 – 00:51:58) Or other— sure, I mean, just, or just apply the federal anti-corruption statutes evenly across the board.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:51:58 – 00:51:58) Yeah.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:51:59 – 00:52:26) And reform begins with ending corruption. That’s widely understood, universally understood. And when the new president of Venezuela— rather, 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 corruption, “Sorry, we’re busting you.” And that goes a long way. But that’s never happened that you know of.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:52:26 – 00:52:33) Wouldn’t that be something if the next administration decided to prosecute Trump and Biden administration officials?
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:52:33 – 00:52:42) Well, just if you commit a crime, I don’t know, why do you get a special pass, right? 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.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:52:42 – 00:52:42) Yeah,
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:52:43 – 00:53:02) but interesting. Okay, well, that’s a— you’ve shocked me. Huh. So now to the, and I’m sorry, I forgot the category that you had for it, the costs of the war that are not directly related to the congressional appropriations.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:53:02 – 00:53:07) Yeah, non-budget. So that includes even stuff that is budget related, but it’s longer term, like veterans care, for example.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:53:07 – 00:53:08) Okay.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:53:08 – 00:53:21) So each person that is, each US troop that is killed or disabled, it just creates a ripple effect of money. Which I think is obvious. I think it’s— the US should properly compensate veterans.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:53:21 – 00:53:22) Yeah, it’s the deal.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:53:23 – 00:53:44) But it’s a cost that’s not talked about immediately. I mean, the best person, the best resource for this is this Harvard professor called Linda Bilmes, who will probably have a report on this coming out soon. But her 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: (00:53:44 – 00:53:45) Yeah, famous book.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:53:45 – 00:54:00) That greatly influenced my thinking and my methodological chops. But that book does a great job in understanding of explaining of how these costs of just one injury just sets off decades of costs. So
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:54:00 – 00:54:03) how many veterans do you know on disability? All
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:54:03 – 00:54:04) of them. Oh yeah.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:54:04 – 00:54:26) I don’t think I’ve ever met one who wasn’t on disability. I’m not huge— 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. 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.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:54:26 – 00:54:42) Yeah. And it’s not talked about. And it’s hard to project, too. But it’s a rule of thumb that I think has been apparent over time is that the cost of war current and future costs of war are always underestimated.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:54:43 – 00:55:50) So what do you think those costs are likely to look like if the Iraq War is any guide?
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:55:51 – 00:55:55) I mean, in terms of the all-encompassing costs—
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:55:56 – 00:55:58) So the Iraq War, we’re saying is $3 trillion.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:56:00 – 00:56:44) It’s more by this point. That was the estimate as of 2008. And then it’s grown since then. So now we’re in Costs of War Project at Brown, which does fabulous work. They, I mean, the cost of the post-9/11 wars is in several trillion dollars, more above $3 trillion, well above $3 trillion. I think it’s $6 to $7 trillion. So the cost of these just, it spirals so quickly.
And these are budgetary costs as well. We’re, again, we’re not measuring— I mean, some people are measuring, and rightfully so, the cost to consumers. So the cost I was just discussing was the cost to us as taxpayers, but not the cost of consumers. So it’s kind of a double whammy
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:56:44 – 00:56:49) as far as you do for the country with that much money. Maybe it wouldn’t be falling apart like it is.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:56:49 – 00:56:52) Yeah, you could pretty much—
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:56:54 – 00:56:55) could we have nice airports?
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:56:56 – 00:58:01) Yeah, I mean, the possibilities are pretty much endless, to end extreme poverty for a year or, it’s a fraction of that. It’s just very, very shocking. Whenever a project is proposed that regardless of what it does, if it promises to make the world better, you have to have an enormous amount of research and cost analysis and all this stuff backing it up. And you have to survive. You have to get it through Congress. There’s tons of political effort. That sort of thing rarely does happen.
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 of whether this stuff actually, these purchases, this money and the stuff that it buys actually does what it says because it’s preventing a catastrophe instead of—
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:58:01 – 00:58:02) you don’t know how bad it could have been.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:58:02 – 00:58:03) Yeah. And
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:58:03 – 00:58:08) it could have been jihadis in bed with you. They could be beheading you right now.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:58:08 – 00:58:09) Yeah. If
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:58:09 – 00:58:12) we hadn’t done what we did. Yeah. So please say thank you.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:58:12 – 00:58:21) 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.
TUCKER CARLSON: (00:58:24 – 00:58:50) So if you’re the Pentagon or a member of Congress taking money from the weapons manufacturers, you’re 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.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (00:58:51 – 01:00:22) Right. And I think the defining feature last election and this one too is about security, but it’s not the security that they’re selling, the brand of national security, quote unquote, “national security” that they’re selling that is believed to be advanced through the use of military force. The security that people feel about is an uneven terrain that they’re on. That they are one financial slip-up or one accident away from, they’re tightrope walking over the abyss in terms of their financial security and their food security. Yeah.
So that’s the security that they’re— that I think is the most at the forefront of people’s minds. So 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 and YouGov, this polling that they’ve done for the issue that Americans identify as the number one issue, 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 Americans’ top issue since July 2022. It still is. So that’s a bad sign for the Trump administration because they—
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:00:22 – 01:00:29) bad sign, well, for sure. And they’re about to get punished, I think. But who knows what’ll happen? But it doesn’t look good.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:00:30 – 01:01:30) No, I mean, I think Republicans will lose in the 2026. They’ll get punished in the same way Democrats did in 2024. Because the 2 main issues that I think have the most political power and most salience among the public are cost of living, economic security, if you will, which is one of the dimensions of human security. So that’s not national security, but it’s the actual everyday security that people experience from the main threats that are non-military that happen to them, that they’re or are liable to happen to them.
So cost of living and then cost of war as well, because people view the Biden administration as more interested in aiding Israel, arming Israel, fighting wars on Israel’s behalf, and sending money to Ukraine for that war 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: (01:01:31 – 01:01:32) Sadly, they were correct in both cases.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:01:32 – 01:01:33) Yep.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:01:34 – 01:01:49) There’s no daylight between the administrations on those 2 issues. What is the— 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.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:01:50 – 01:02:01) Yeah, I’m just going to just stall for a bit so people don’t think I’m a nerd, but not like I didn’t just calculated this, but through 2025, the US has provided $352 billion in aid to Israel since its founding, since the 1950s.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:02:01 – 01:02:03) $352 billion?
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:02:03 – 01:02:04) Yeah.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:02:05 – 01:02:06) Yeah. Isn’t it the size of New Jersey?
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:02:07 – 01:02:10) It has about 9 million people. So I don’t know how big New Jersey is.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:02:10 – 01:02:14) It’s physically the size of New Jersey, smaller population than New Jersey.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:02:15 – 01:02:16) And that, so
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:02:16 – 01:02:18) that’s crazy.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:02:18 – 01:02:40) So when we talk about the military aid that’s provided each year, the number, there’s $3.3 billion provided through the State Department budget for this 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 money on its own, buying weapons for its own agency using US taxpayer dollars.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:02:40 – 01:02:51) 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—
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:02:52 – 01:02:55) yeah, which I have a bit of a problem with.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:02:55 – 01:02:55) Why?
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:02:57 – 01:02:58) If you’re interested in—
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:02:59 – 01:03:03) it sounds like an electric windmill, kind of. We’re paying to run it.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:03:03 – 01:03:16) 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: (01:03:16 – 01:03:22) We should run it through another country. Why wouldn’t we just send the money to Lockheed then? Right? What?
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:03:23 – 01:04:42) Pretty much are. Once that— you brought up the economic benefits, I think, or maybe I did, I don’t know. But the jobs argument often comes up with military spending. We saw this a lot with the Biden administration with sending their massive amounts of military aid to Ukraine. “Oh, the money’s being spent here. This is creating US jobs.” The link between more military spending and more jobs is hazy at best.
So for example, 1985, the US arms industry employed 3.1 million people. Okay. That was in 1985. In 2021, the arms industry employed 1.1 million people. So a reduction of 2 million people in the arms industry, private sector arms industry employees.
So despite that, so there’s a 2 million drop in jobs, but 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 2 million drop in arms industry employment.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:04:43 – 01:04:47) Did weapons get that much more expensive, or how does that work?
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:04:47 – 01:05:38) Yes, that’s part of it. And then another part is just factors that affected every industry that led to the decline of manufacturing in the U.S., but also profit-driven interests as well. They want arms— arms companies’ main concern is profit. So that 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 it’s just through these cost-saving measures to boost profit and technological advances that affected every sector. In terms of employment and arms industry employment, the relationship between military spending and economic benefit is very, very shaky. It sounds inverse. So,
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:05:38 – 01:05:39) well, yeah.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:05:40 – 01:05:59) And it’s also a sign when you hear that, “Oh, this creates jobs.” Okay. That’s a tacit admission that their main justification, which is national security, which is, security is, it’s the one thing that people can’t do without. It’s the most important thing. So if they’re making something a jobs argument, that means their national security argument is not threatening.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:05:59 – 01:06:00) Such a smart point.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:06:00 – 01:06:00) You know,
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:06:00 – 01:06:03) I’m a little confused by your Israel aid number. So
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:06:03 – 01:06:09) $350 billion. That’s inflation-adjusted terms over the course since 19—
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:06:09 – 01:06:10) constant terms.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:06:10 – 01:06:23) Yeah. And as of 2025, so that excludes the $4 billion that was passed this year for 2026, and that includes the $3.3 billion that I mentioned for the gift card. And then here’s the—
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:06:23 – 01:06:25) so we’re at $360-ish,
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:06:27 – 01:06:29) thereabouts. Yeah. Because you have to adjust all past.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:06:29 – 01:06:43) So I’m confused with $360 billion. 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.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:06:43 – 01:06:51) 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: (01:06:51 – 01:07:02) So has the Israeli Treasury sent us over $360 billion? What is she talking about? Or is it a hard-to-quantify moral victory that’s just worth a lot?
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:07:02 – 01:07:04) It’s just best not to think about, Tucker.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:07:04 – 01:07:07) I think you’re right. It’s in that category.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:07:07 – 01:07:15) “Just ignore it. Just ignore it till it goes away. Just do your show, Tucker. God.” But here’s the mess. Here’s the mess with you.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:07:15 – 01:07:17) It’s best not to think about it.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:07:17 – 01:07:45) Here’s one thing, though. So when you count military aid, and military aid is most of that $352 billion, $360 billion I just talked about, it does— 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, actually for the exclusive part, pretty much. It doesn’t include literally assisting a country militarily. So I just crunched the numbers on the, how many—
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:07:45 – 01:07:46) Wait, can you, what does that mean?
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:07:46 – 01:08:02) So if the US, for example, since October 2023, fired an estimated 609 missile interceptors for the sole purpose of defending Israeli territory from Iranian ballistic— incoming Iranian ballistic missiles and Houthi missiles.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:08:02 – 01:08:03) Is that the number?
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:08:03 – 01:08:06) Yeah, I just calculated them yesterday for this show.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:08:06 – 01:08:07) You did?
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:08:07 – 01:08:08) Yeah, it took forever.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:08:08 – 01:08:15) Why are you do— why is no one else doing— I’m sorry, I know I’m sidebarring you again and again, but why is it up to you to do this?
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:08:15 – 01:08:18) Yeah, I wonder that myself. It’s just some—
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:08:18 – 01:08:20) no, but where’s everybody else?
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:08:20 – 01:08:24) Some guy in Pittsburgh with an internet connection alone. No, but it’s myself.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:08:24 – 01:08:36) There’s a cat there. You have a background worthy of your job. But I do think that 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?
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:08:38 – 01:08:48) I’m good at it. I’ll admit that. I also think there’s a skill set that’s required. But also, I mean, I think the main thing is just the effort that’s required.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:08:48 – 01:08:49) No one wants to know.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:08:49 – 01:08:57) Yeah, there’s that too. That explains, I mean, a lot of the disinterest from whatever number officials give, that’s the number.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:08:57 – 01:09:05) But it’s calculated disinterest. It’s Nikki Haley up there, “Israel gets a, give us a lot more than we give them.” And it’s like, “Okay, I guess.”
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:09:06 – 01:09:27) And it’s like, actually one of the funny, one of the most useful bits of information that we got was from this Washington Post report back in May that said the US had fired over 200 of these THAAD interceptors. Yes, terminal high altitude something. But these really expensive missiles and the most
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:09:27 – 01:09:28) expensive. Yeah,
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:09:29 – 01:09:29) close.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:09:30 – 01:09:30) No, not that.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:09:30 – 01:11:42) That was the next number that was mentioned, actually. So it said more than 200 THAADs and then more than 100 of these Standard missiles, which include the Standard Missile-3 and then the Standard Missile-6, which operate at lower altitudes. The interceptors actually, the US has employed 4 types since October ’23 to defend Israel, and they are the SM-3, which are $31 million each for fiscal year 2027. For any fact-checkers at home, that refers to FY27 discretionary cost, unit flyaway recurring cost, just for any fact-checkers out there. Basically anyone who’s pedantic about the numbers like I am.
So you have this about $30 million interceptor called the SM-3, which is the only one that the US has to make space-based interceptions. Because so ballistic missiles launch, they go through a 1 to 5 minute boost phase, they leave the Earth’s atmosphere, they travel in space for a bit, 20 minutes or so, and then they come crashing down in a minute or 2 window called the terminal phase. And then the middle part is called the midcourse phase.
It’s tech. You have the most opportunities in the midcourse phase because it’s about 20 minutes long. It’s the longest of the 3 phases. The problem is you need an interceptor that’s capable, that’s technologically advanced to reach outer space and intercept a missile in it.
And also, it’s— if you’re able 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— they basically travel in this cloud of debris and it’s at the same trajectory as the missile itself, which makes it extremely difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were.
So the US has fired, during the June 2025 war, fired 80 of these things at around $30 million a pop. That was just during the June 2025 war. And then they didn’t, the Post didn’t give a breakdown between that and the other Standard missile, but it’s been over 100 combined.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:11:42 – 01:11:49) How many of those 30 in the first war, the last summer war, were fired in defense of Israel?
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:11:50 – 01:12:27) So there was, I believe there’s 80 launched, 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 that number, all the recorded intercepts, documented use of these interceptors that the US has used for just not in defense of its own bases, but for the sole purpose of defense of Israel since October 2023 through September 2026, the 3 years, you get 609.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:12:28 – 01:12:33) I’ve never received a thank you note or really any expression of gratitude from anyone in that government.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:12:33 – 01:13:38) Not coming enough, really. That’s what we’re told. So it’s really quite shocking. And actually JD Vance actually had a slip up where he, he was kind of shook from whatever brainwashing happened to him, but he jumped, he kind of had an outburst where a reporter asked him about U.S. support for Israel and he corroborated the Washington Post report where the numbers I just mentioned, the more than 200 THAAD and the more than 100 Standard missiles, were about 2/3 of all interceptors fired for defense of Israel. So that includes Israeli interceptors as well.
So the US shouldered around 2/3 of the missile defense burden for Israel during the 2026 war and close to 70% during the 2025 war. And that, I’m not factoring in the $500 million in missile defense aid the US has provided every year for Israel to buy those interceptors, its own interceptors. I haven’t crunched those numbers yet. I was hoping to have it ready for the show. It just takes, I swear to God, it takes forever, man.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:13:38 – 01:13:42) Wow. That is just absolutely remarkable.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:13:42 – 01:13:44) Yeah. And I,
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:13:45 – 01:14:07) wait, so $350 billion since its founding for a tiny country. I mean, that’s the largest source. I mean, is there any— it’s unfair to ask you this, having not asked you to prepare for it, but is— I mean, that’s got to be the biggest source of income to the economy, right? Over time, there’s no oil and gas there.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:14:07 – 01:14:11) As far as— it’s the largest cumulative amount the US has provided any other country. I’m—
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:14:12 – 01:14:12) ever?
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:14:13 – 01:15:06) Out of all countries. Yeah. And as far as waging war on another country’s behalf, I mean, there’s really 3 costs that I’ve only, I’ve only really done 2. I’m still calculating the, so there’s arming Israel, the aid that 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 that shit. So 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, I don’t think there’s any one thing, any one 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: (01:15:06 – 01:15:07) Marco Rubio said it out loud.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:15:07 – 01:15:08) Yeah.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:15:08 – 01:15:22) 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 it cannot be erased.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:15:22 – 01:15:25) Yeah, it’s not for U.S. interests. It’s not “America First.”
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:15:25 – 01:15:25) No.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:15:26 – 01:15:38) Which I still think— it hasn’t been implemented, obviously, as we’ve painfully found out. But I still think that idea has a good amount of currency.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:15:39 – 01:15:39) America first.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:15:40 – 01:15:40) Yeah,
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:15:40 – 01:15:41) of course,
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:15:41 – 01:15:43) if implemented properly. You’re talking about, it’s
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:15:43 – 01:15:51) called democracy. That’s what democracy is. No, it’s democracy. Yeah, you serve on behalf of the citizens of your country. They own the country.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:15:51 – 01:15:53) I just caught myself over-intellectualizing that. Thanks for—
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:15:53 – 01:16:08) no, but you’re right. 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.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:16:09 – 01:16:09) Yeah.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:16:09 – 01:16:31) Some are not, but some do a good job and they’re really popular, and people who live there don’t want to replace the king. Why is he popular? Because they think he’s serving their interests. He’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. Right.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:16:31 – 01:16:33) And it’s painful being told the opposite.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:16:33 – 01:16:36) The leaders serve the people they lead,
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:16:36 – 01:16:38) right? It’s the difference between ruling and governing, really.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:16:39 – 01:16:39) Yeah.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:16:39 – 01:16:41) And it’s just a hell of a lot easier to rule.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:16:42 – 01:16:47) Yeah, but you can even rule that— you can rule with the people’s interests in mind. You can.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:16:47 – 01:16:59) Yeah, but you still have to answer to people and pay attention to what people think. But with ruling, yeah, you could just wage wars on country’s behalf. You can direct funding to the exact companies you want, for all intents and purposes, you can.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:17:00 – 01:17:24) Well, then you have to ask, who’s actually being oppressed here? Is it the— are we doing this to liberate the long-suffering people of Iran or Russia or Vietnam or name your country, Somalia, all these countries we’ve gone to war against or within their borders? And it’s, I hope for liberation for everyone, but I see the American public is being oppressed by everything that you mentioned?
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:17:25 – 01:18:12) I think workers across the world are being oppressed. I really think one of the main political conflicts going on now is the workers versus the war profiteers and the warmongers. I mean, you can define working class how you like, but regardless of your definition, if you’re even just 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, as it were.
And if you’re not putting workers’ interests first 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: (01:18:12 – 01:18:36) It’s the oldest story there is. The king bankrupted his country through wars and got overthrown. I mean, only in an ahistorical moment like this one are people rediscovering something that every empire has learned serially for millennia, which is what I just said. King bankrupts his country through hubris in war and gets overthrown, or his kids get overthrown, or whatever. That’s how you wreck your empire,
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:18:36 – 01:18:42) right? Do you think more people are starting to realize that, especially over these last couple years, in the general public?
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:18:43 – 01:19:26) I think that 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 problems that are accelerating, I think people are way deeper than they were just a few years ago.
I mean, you’d be at the airport and you hear people talking about celebrity news or something called People Magazine. Do you remember that? Chronicled the diet habits of actors or something. The whole thing was so absurd and frivolous and embarrassing, really. And no, I feel like people have been forced to confront real topics. So yeah, no, I think people are starting to figure stuff out. Of course they are.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:19:26 – 01:20:03) I was thinking about, I’ve been thinking about for months, what the proper, how the public is perceiving the political elite broadly, the establishment. How they perceive your average politician or the head of state.
And 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, hello. And I thought of it then, which is what if that pilot was visibly wearing a parachute as he was greeting passengers to his airplane about to fly?
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:20:04 – 01:20:05) That is so good.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:20:05 – 01:21:37) And it’s like, “Do I get one?” “No, no, no, no. Your seat’s down there. Don’t worry about it, but have a good flight.” Okay. And I think that’s kind of, it hearkens back to this actual, it hearkens back to this quote I had, or I heard during the 2024 election where it’s, “Young people don’t see real hope. They just see a dying empire led by bad people.”
Oh, I have a stat for you. You want to hear it? About the— so, okay. So this is a poll taken May 2026, New York Times Ipsos. This asked whether people support, somewhat support, somewhat oppose, or strongly oppose additional aid to Israel. Okay. Most people oppose it. All right. So 19% somewhat, 38% strongly support it. Now, it divides that into a bunch of different categories like age, political affiliation, that sort of thing.
Among the survey respondents who did not vote in 2024, the most popular response was strongly oppose additional aid to Israel. And 50%, 50, half of the people who did not vote in 2024 answered that they strongly oppose additional aid to Israel. And I think it’s not about, it’s part of—
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:21:37 – 01:21:38) Military aid or just aid?
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:21:39 – 01:21:42) The question asked about additional military and economic aid.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:21:42 – 01:21:45) So yeah, that’s both kinds of aid. So aid.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:21:45 – 01:23:47) Right. So I think that’s twofold. I think 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 at this point.
And also there’s Gaza is, it’s the Schrödinger’s cat of political issues. I don’t know if you’ve noticed it, but it’s, if you are on, this is something I’ve noticed on Twitter, particularly from this group called, I call ALOTS, which are, which is short for acrimonious liberal on Twitter.
Is that I will get yelled at for, if I bring up polling on Gaza in the 2024 election and how big of an effect it had on Kamala Harris’s loss, I will be told by someone who will say, “Oh, Gaza didn’t matter at all.” Or in the next breath, sometimes from the same person, it says, “Oh, well, the people who didn’t vote in 2024 because of Gaza got what they deserved.” So a president they didn’t want, I guess.
So it kind of occupies these 2 spaces where critics of people, people who criticize other people who have made Gaza, have decided that Gaza matters to them on an electoral level, that it’ll affect their judgment and their vote and their voting behavior, that it oscillates between this is the most important issue or this is the issue that doesn’t it was a non-factor completely. So people just really can’t decide.
But I think it did matter. I think this and the polling I just mentioned and a bunch of other polls suggest that it did matter too. But I think it’s also the interaction between putting another country, especially one committing war crimes on a near daily basis, ahead of the interests of people.
And I think this is where this intersection between the cost of war and the cost of living crisis they meet. Because it’s not just the financial resources being dumped in, it’s the political capital too. If you think about the one—
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:23:47 – 01:23:49) it’s the attention, right?
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:23:49 – 01:24:19) So this, think about the one legislative priority that Joe Biden took out an Oval Office address to sell. It was the foreign aid bill for that provided the record amount of aid to Israel, a bunch of money for the war in Ukraine as well, and a bunch of money for Pacific aid, for Taiwan aid as well. That— it wasn’t his infrastructure bill, it wasn’t his massive Build Back Better plan that he fought, he devoted the most political capital to.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:24:19 – 01:24:21) I didn’t remember that. That’s amazing.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:24:21 – 01:24:28) That was the one bit of legislation that he decided was worthy of an Oval Office address, addressed to the nation, to sell.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:24:29 – 01:24:44) Well, they’ve just— they’ve given up on our population, on our country, on us. They’re looting it now. And their parachute is crypto and then another passport, and they’re out. And you sort of know that. They’re not lashing themselves to the mast of the SS America.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:24:44 – 01:24:45) No, they’ve got their parachute on.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:24:46 – 01:24:51) For real. And I think we have every reason to be offended by that.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:24:51 – 01:24:52) Right.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:24:53 – 01:25:37) 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 I think it’s exactly what you said hurt Kamala Harris, but it’s even now the connection between this foreign misadventure and their declining quality of life and standard of living. It’s just so— it’s one-to-one. You block the Strait of Hormuz. Even I can understand that. Yeah, no energy flows. “You did this to me, I had— 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 it’s a system problem. Both parties.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:25:37 – 01:25:39) I hope a lot of people— that’s my read on it. I
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:25:39 – 01:25:41) think it is. Does polling suggest that?
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:25:42 – 01:25:49) I’m still working through the data because, I mean, this was just a bit of the research that I have going on. I think I have too many projects going on, Tucker, but
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:25:49 – 01:25:50) you’re doing a lot of math.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:25:51 – 01:26:16) 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 T, so I just don’t make that good food, I guess. But for this, I’m just all about getting it right. And also just being, as you know, being independent means you got a lot of freedom, but it also means that you don’t really have any institutional protection.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:26:16 – 01:26:17) Oh, for sure. Yeah.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:26:17 – 01:26:50) So if I make a mistake, heaven forbid, one that’s, that turns out to be a cost estimate that turns out to be catastrophically wrong, or I misplace a decimal or something on some sort of bill I’m summarizing the cost of, I have nothing really to protect me. And it’s, so as I operate this newsletter on Substack called Polygraph, it’s, if I mess up there, then I will be punished immediately for it. In a very, very harsh way. I forget what I was going on about.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:26:50 – 01:26:58) But also, it’s like being a sportswriter. We always used to say when I worked at a newspaper, the sportswriters did the hardest job because their readers knew a lot about the topic.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:26:58 – 01:26:59) Yeah.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:26:59 – 01:27:07) So if they made any mistakes— so your readers, anybody who writes about something specific like this, your readers were a self-selected group who are coming at it with prior knowledge.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:27:07 – 01:27:12) Yeah. And it’s, I have some paid subscribers who are actually mentors of mine.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:27:13 – 01:27:13) Oh, sure.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:27:13 – 01:27:36) Yeah. And it’s also just people I don’t know. There’s some, I get notes from people who usually positive, who really, really know their stuff. Learn a lot from my readers. You were asking about whether the people view the Iran War as a system problem or as
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:27:36 – 01:27:37) a partisan problem.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:27:37 – 01:28:43) Right. I think the Iran war happens if Kamala Harris gets elected. I think Trump is— I think it happens either way. I don’t know if the war takes the same shape, but the political establishment, the national security establishment was just headed that way. And if you think, I think back to this interview that Harris gave in October, maybe of 2024, where she was asked, “What’s the biggest threat to America?”
Now, if you look at polling, the most popular answer is always America. People always say America is the biggest threat to America. And then the next ones are Russia and China, for obvious reasons. That has gotten the most attention as rival powers to the US, I guess, over the last few years in terms of building up the threat and animosity towards each of those countries.
Harris answered Iran as the biggest threat to the US. And that was only, she wouldn’t have answered the same way had October 7th and the resulting genocide not happened. I can’t believe that. So I
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:28:43 – 01:28:48) feel like Iran, and when was this interview? October of ’24?
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:28:48 – 01:29:05) Yeah, this was when people were answering, I mean, the answer, the number of the percentage of Americans who would call Iran the top threat is still probably somewhat low, but it was in 4 to 5% of Americans calling Iran their top threat. But here was Kamala Harris.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:29:05 – 01:29:07) Have you ever been mugged by a Persian?
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:29:08 – 01:29:08) No.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:29:09 – 01:29:09) I haven’t either.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:29:09 – 01:29:12) No, they’ve only just been extremely nice to me.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:29:12 – 01:29:22) I agree. I had breakfast with one this morning, actually. Yeah, he went to Harvard, more literate than I am. Yeah, no, it’s not a low IQ group. It’s a very impressive group.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:29:22 – 01:29:26) Oh, it’s always so embarrassing when a non-native English speaker speaks English better than you.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:29:26 – 01:29:38) That hurts me a lot. For sure. As Kant said. Yeah. But it’s just amazing that she could say that it was Iran. So she’s being paid to say that, of course.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:29:40 – 01:30:07) Yeah. And I really viewed her as, and I think she viewed herself too, as a continuation of the Biden administration. It was the direction the Biden administration, the effect of the national security establishment, it’s an inner, it’s an interaction between the White House and the underlying establishment. But that’s just the direction I got the sense that the US was going. It was just the march toward war. It was just escalating because the US decided—
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:30:07 – 01:30:07) I felt that strongly.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:30:08 – 01:30:54) The US just decided, 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 was just no conditions on it. Not just the vast amount of the historic amount of resources invested, but 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. But just overtly waging war on Israel’s behalf too is just an obscene escalation.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:30:54 – 01:31:16) I’ve been on TV for 30 years when October 7th happened, and 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, because it was, ah, 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, it was, there’s a lot of things going on. Why am I going after Israel? I kind of like the country.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:31:16 – 01:31:19) And there was just a massacre that took place on October 7th.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:31:19 – 01:31:45) Well, of course. And there was that. I was highly offended by the murder of innocents in Israel. And I still am when I think about it. We just, the anniversary was 2 weeks ago and I was thinking about it. It’s awful killing girls at a concert. Come on.
But there was that, but I mean, 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.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:31:45 – 01:31:45) When,
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:31:46 – 01:31:58) 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.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:31:58 – 01:32:10) It really was. And it was, you can see the historical foundation there, a buildup over time where it’s this longstanding support for Israel, this repeating these axioms. “My support for Israel is ironclad.”
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:32:10 – 01:32:12) I just kind of ignored it. Yeah.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:32:12 – 01:32:15) Because it was just, it’s kind of it became white noise to a point.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:32:16 – 01:33:19) They had it. I spoke at the Republican Convention 2024 for Trump the night he was inaugurated. And I was, of course, I’ve had a lot of time to think about that in the last 6 months since Trump has done things that I, so offensive to me, I can’t even control myself. I’m so upset about it. So I went and watched that speech. I was, 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 it. There was Israeli flags flying in the convention center at that convention, 2024. Israeli flags in an American presidential party nomination. And 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 tuned it out.
“You’ve got your Israel thing. You’re pretty obsessed about Israel. Whatever. Have fun with your little Israel thing.” And, you’re into the World Cup and soccer and you’re, you know what I mean? It was like that. 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.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:33:19 – 01:33:20) It became impossible to ignore.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:33:21 – 01:33:21) Well, that’s it.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:33:22 – 01:33:22) Yeah,
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:33:22 – 01:33:22) exactly.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:33:22 – 01:33:42) And then, I really think the main driver for the change in public opinion in Israel has been morally based. And I think opposition to U.S. policy toward Israel would even be higher if people actually knew these, the true costs. If the government actually bothered to investigate the atrocities being carried out with U.S. weapons.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:33:43 – 01:33:55) Well, can I say, I never recommend Wikipedia for anything. It’s controlled by the intel agencies, foreign and domestic. It’s everything about it offends me. But the Wikipedia entry on Gaza, which is probably the most contested entry on the entire site, of course,
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:33:55 – 01:33:56) all those warnings at the top,
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:33:56 – 01:34:04) 100%. But because it’s so contested, I think you can look at it with some confidence, at least for an overview, maybe not in every detail.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:34:04 – 01:34:04) Yeah.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:34:05 – 01:34:23) 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. You can’t Nazi propaganda. It’s hard to dismiss.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:34:24 – 01:34:35) Yeah. I think this is a reckoning that’s coming from the political establishment as well, where it’s, initially opposition to the genocide in Gaza was just, “Oh, this is just people on the left, totally, totally third
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:34:35 – 01:34:36) worlders.”
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:34:36 – 01:34:39) Yeah. “And rich kids yelling at us from the—
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:34:39 – 01:34:39) totally
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:34:39 – 01:34:50) on TikTok from their dad’s company car.” But no, it’s, no, the call was coming from inside the house very much so. These are the base. These are, you can’t tell you—
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:34:50 – 01:35:09) I kind of ignored it. I’m so embarrassed to say that, but I did. I was, “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.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:35:10 – 01:35:13) Was there the defining moment where you felt a switch?
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:35:13 – 01:35:15) Yeah, they blew up 2 churches and I was like—
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:35:15 – 01:35:16) Oh, I remember that.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:35:16 – 01:35:43) I was like, 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, whatever, it’s a long, not very interesting story, but I mentioned it to some evangelicals, not on camera, of course, but just in private. And I’m not evangelical, but I’ve always liked them. And I said something about it. They’re like, “Shut up.” Say, “No, no, Christian churches, your denomination, your faith, their churches are blown up.”
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:35:43 – 01:35:45) It’s like, how do you not feel connected to that person?
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:35:45 – 01:35:46) “Shut up.”
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:35:46 – 01:35:47) Yeah.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:35:47 – 01:35:51) This is the sickest. This is the weirdest thing. I didn’t know what it was. This is the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:35:51 – 01:35:55) Did they also have their fingers plugged into their ears and go, “No, no, no, no, no, no”?
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:35:55 – 01:36:22) 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 it was that actually changed my view. I was like, whenever someone’s like, “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’re Christians. You should care about the bombing of a church.” “Shut up.”
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:36:24 – 01:36:33) It’s like Catholic Relief Services, a humanitarian group, and a couple other faith-based organizations as well that are in the Christian denomination reported on it and were like,
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:36:33 – 01:36:35) oh, well, now then I went right down the rabbit hole
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:36:35 – 01:36:35) and started
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:36:35 – 01:36:52) talking to people. And I spent time in the Middle East, so I called people I knew, and then I realized, wow, this is 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 it’s impossible to ignore.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:36:52 – 01:36:58) Yeah, and the attacks on Christian centers in southern Lebanon and attacks on all people in Lebanon.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:36:58 – 01:37:16) That is one of the most upsetting things. And 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 is one of the worst. And then bomb Beirut, where you used to live.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:37:18 – 01:37:20) You feel that in your soul. You really do.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:37:20 – 01:37:21) Oh, I couldn’t agree more.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:37:23 – 01:37:35) You really do. One of the things I’m going to look at for a project is I’m going to, you mentioned grabbing land. I think ultimately that this is, it’s about land. It’s about grabbing land.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:37:35 – 01:37:35) Of course.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:37:36 – 01:38:09) And I’m going to compare diligently, teach myself how to use satellite imagery or maybe just something rudimentary like Google Maps or something and outline a pre-October ’23 and compare it to 1967 borders as well. But just compare the shift in the amount of territory that Israel occupies, not only just Gaza, more in the West Bank, more in southern Syria, southern Lebanon as well. And I just want a number, just to quantify how much of a land grab is happening. And I’m unaware if anyone else has done it. I hope so.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:38:09 – 01:38:16) Do you know anyone who’s done reliable, you would consider factually accurate analyses of what’s happened in Gaza?
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:38:18 – 01:38:20) Oh, on what level?
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:38:20 – 01:38:22) How many people killed? Let’s just start there.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:38:23 – 01:39:15) 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.” It’s the Hamas government. These are just civil people. They’re not in the army. But the most reliable figures that, the verified figures are 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, even Israeli intelligence agencies have admitted that they use Gaza Ministry numbers.
So I think that’s where it’s coming from in terms of, 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. American
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:39:15 – 01:39:16) University of Beirut,
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:39:16 – 01:39:25) right where I was. Excellent resource. UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese. Nice
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:39:25 – 01:39:25) woman.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:39:26 – 01:39:26) Have you met
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:39:27 – 01:39:28) her? Yeah.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:39:28 – 01:40:07) Oh, cool. That’s probably actually one person I would just be extremely excited to meet her. 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 I mean, there’s really a hell of a lot of people doing good work on this.
It’s just, I’ve thought about Gaza pretty much every day for the last 3 years. It wears on you a bit. So I did, it’s not out of interest of some weird obsession or anything. It’s just the feeling of ignoring it though would be far worse than having it at the forefront.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:40:08 – 01:40:08) You can’t unsee it.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:40:09 – 01:40:09) Yeah.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:40:10 – 01:40:19) Stephen Semler, I really appreciate all the time you spent and particularly the numbers. And will you restate one last time where people can follow you in case they didn’t catch it?
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:40:19 – 01:40:30) 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 stephensemler.com.
TUCKER CARLSON: (01:40:30 – 01:40:32) I love it. Thank you.
STEPHEN SEMLER: (01:40:32 – 01:40:32) Thank you, Tucker.

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