Wednesday, February 25, 2026
Disclaimer: the views expressed here are the sole responsibility of the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein.
I wasn’t going to watch the full Carlson/Huckabee debate. The few excerpts I watched were enough to know how it went. Carlson was an attack dog, throwing out so many falsehoods so rapidly, that it was impossible for Huckabee to refute them. Huckabee was well-meaning, but Carlson was not. He was using a well-known debate technique, called the “Gish gallop,” which made it impossible for Huckabee to answer him in any meaningful way.
The term “Gish gallop” was coined by anthropologist Eugenie
Scott of the National Center for Science Education, who named it after
creationist Duane Gish, who used this rhetorical strategy often, during
the 1980s and 90s. The Gish gallop involves overwhelming one’s opponent with a rapid-fire,
relentless torrent of weak arguments, half-truths, and misrepresentations,
making it impossible to adequately refute each point in real-time. Scott described
the Gish gallop as an uneven debate, "where the creationist is allowed to
run on for 45 minutes or an hour, spewing forth torrents of error that the
evolutionist hasn't a prayer of refuting in the format of a debate.”
The main goal of the Gish gallop is to create the appearance
of winning by sheer volume of points rather than quality or accuracy. Today,
the strategy is used to argue all sorts of things, politics, animal rights, and,
in the case of Tucker Carlson, the assertion that Jews are evil creatures who
commit genocide and who have no right to their indigenous territory, Israel.
The Gish gallop tactic exploits an asymmetry: Making a claim
takes only seconds, but refuting a claim may take several minutes. Practically
speaking, if someone throws out 10 questionable assertions in two minutes, it
can take 20 minutes or more for their opponent to carefully address them. The imbalance
between the two sides creates the appearance that the galloper “won” because
many of their points went unanswered.
Carlson repeatedly told Huckabee that he wasn’t answering his questions, though Huckabee did his level best, explaining and explaining the facts over and over again, never losing his patience. Tucker pressed the ambassador to describe the borders of the Land of Israel, which the ambassador did over and over again. Tucker demanded that Huckabee prove that the Jews of today are the Jews of yesterday, falsely asserting that Netanyahu’s father didn’t speak Hebrew. Huckabee answered him, but Tucker kept saying he hadn’t answered him:
Tucker Carlson: [I] have two questions. What are the borders of that? And who are those people in 2025? And you’re not the first person I’ve asked, but you’re the most reasonable, most gentle, most theologically informed. So I’m really hoping for an answer.
The first question was the borders. I can’t get an answer on those borders, so I’m going to give up. But the second question is every bit as pressing — which is, who are the people? Who are the modern descendants? So we know, and I believe, and I agree with you as a Christian, that God promised this land from modern-day Iraq to modern-day Egypt to this people, the Jews — to Abram’s descendants, as it says in Genesis 15. Who are his descendants now? And how do we know who they are?
Mike Huckabee: I think they’re the Jews. And we know who they are because they’ve always been a Jewish people. There has been an unbroken line of Jewish people, and they’ve lived in this land for 3,800 years. Sometimes not very many of them, because they were chased out all over the world. They were hunted down. They were almost annihilated during the Holocaust. They came back. Tucker, they represent — you know how many Jews there are in the whole world —
Tucker Carlson: Please. I understand. First of all, the greatest genocide of Jews that no one ever mentions was by the Romans, where they were literally banned from Jerusalem for 500 years.
Mike Huckabee: Yeah, of course.
Tucker Carlson: And it’s all awful. And I’m opposed to all of that. I’m opposed to mass killing of anybody, period. I mean it.
Mike Huckabee: Yeah.
Tucker Carlson: And I hope you agree on that.
Mike Huckabee: I believe that.
Tucker Carlson: My question is — and it’s not a bumper sticker answer, it’s a sincere question — how do we know? Because what you’re saying is that certain people have a title to a highly contested region. They own it in some deep sense. So I think it’s fair to ask, who are they and how do we know?
The current prime minister’s ancestors weren’t from here within recorded history. He has no deeds. Bibi Netanyahu, on one side, has family from Poland. They’re from Eastern Europe. So how do we know that he has a connection to the people whom God promised the land to — Abram’s descendants? How do we know that?
Mike Huckabee: Well, if you take the genealogies that come not only from the Old but the New Testament, you see that there is a historical connection through the entirety of the Old and the New Testament that details the Jewish connection to this land.
Tucker Carlson: Does that include Bibi’s family? How do we know that if his family scattered? But how do we know it’s the same people? Why is that crazy? If you say to me —
Mike Huckabee: If they speak the same language, if they worship the same God, if they follow the same Bible, if they follow the same cultures and traditions — and they always pray “next year in Jerusalem,” and they pray for the peace of Jerusalem, and they pray facing toward Jerusalem — does that not give you a little bit of a clue as to who they are?
Tucker Carlson: Let’s go through those things, because I would like to have a rational — this is the conversation I’ve wanted.
Mike Huckabee: Bless you.
Tucker Carlson: Thank you for doing this. Let’s just go through those things.
Mike Huckabee: Okay.
Tucker Carlson: So one of the things I admire most about Israel is they resurrected a dead language in 1948. Good for them.
Mike Huckabee: Well, they really didn’t resurrect it — it was existent.
Tucker Carlson: That’s not — but that’s a compliment. I’m not slightly —
Mike Huckabee: No, no, no. But it is the first time in all of human history that a language has survived through this length of time. I would call it — you might not — but I would call it a miracle, one of many. That you can —
Tucker Carlson: I think it’s wonderful. As someone who loves language — Netanyahu’s parents did not speak Hebrew.
Mike Huckabee: Okay.
Tucker Carlson: They didn’t live in this region. The founders of this country were mostly secular. Some of them were avowed atheists. They were not praying for the peace of Jerusalem. They weren’t praying at all because they didn’t believe in God. There’s no genealogy linking their families to the people of this land 3,000 years ago. So how do we know — since they didn’t share a language, they didn’t share a religion, they had no religion whatsoever — how do we know that they had a right to come here from Eastern Europe and —
Mike Huckabee: But they were scattered.
Tucker Carlson: — the land.
Mike Huckabee: They were scattered to — they were scattered all over the world. There were many in Ethiopia. They were in Russia. They were in Poland. They were throughout Asia. Jews were all over the place. But they were still Jews. But they were still Jews.
Mike Huckabee answered him and answered him, but how much
information does he have offhand to respond to the torrent of questions and
falsehoods. For example, it’s not true that Netanyahu’s father didn’t speak
Hebrew. But how would Huckabee know these details? It wasn’t a fair fight, and
anyway, Huckabee wasn’t fighting. Only Carlson was fighting, or perhaps more
accurately, attacking.
Anyone who has been pulled into debate with internet trolls
knows how this goes. The trolls bombard you with questions and so-called facts
so that you never get the chance to even try to respond to a single point.
Should one manage to get a point across, the troll will respond with a torrent
of word vomit—something along the lines of, “But what about this? What about
that? I guess you don’t want to answer, because you know I’m right.”
Carlson is the very prototype of the troll. A particularly
hateful and combative one. Who loves to spread falsehoods about the Jews, and can
spew them a mile a minute. The Gish gallop is how Tucker rolls. Because he is
incapable of honest debate.
The Gish gallop is a coward’s form of debate, because the
tactic relies more on cognitive overload than on strong argumentation. And as I
said, I wasn’t going to watch over two hours of that, but then I saw an article
asserting that Tucker’s maniacal laughter is a sign of clinical
mental illness. That was enough to make me want to listen to the entire
agonizing two hour and 42 minute interview. I was curious—I wanted to see if
the theory held water. In the end, I was very aggravated to discover that
Tucker didn’t actually engage in his characteristic hyena-like laughter, which
means that I basically listened to the whole thing for nothing.
Worse yet, it triggered spam from Carlson inviting me to subscribe. Feh. As if.
There’s one thing one can say about Carlson, and that’s that
he has stamina. Which is the key component of the successful use of the Gish
gallop. Bless Mike Huckabee for trying to refute him, but you might as well
teach a waterfall to go up instead of down.
I wish Huckabee had spoken to Carlson in private—that it hadn’t become performative—a show for Carlson’s audience. But Carlson would never have given Huckabee the opportunity. Because it wouldn’t have served his need to generate clicks and views, and spreading Jew-hate is always a popular sport.
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