Mark Levin and Tucker Carlson, two of the top pro-Trump commentators in the right-wing media ecosystem who also happen to be former Fox News colleagues, are currently embroiled in a war of words that has now seen one call the other a “schmuck” and a “little b*stard.”
The tête-à-tête began last week when Levin, a Fox News host whom Donald Trump recently appointed to the “revamped” Homeland Security Advisory Council, took issue with recent comments Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff made to MAGA outlet Breitbart.
“The Neocon element believes that war is the only way to solve things,” Witkoff said in the interview. “The president believes that his force of personality, the way he is going to respond to certain situations, can bend people to do things in a better way in the interests of the United States government.”
Levin, a hawkish right-winger who still believed in the weapons of mass destruction rationale for war in Iraq in 2014, reacted to the interview by claiming Witkoff “talks like the fifth column isolationists” before saying he waited with “great interest” on the deal the envoy was negotiating with Iran.
“In the meantime, rather than sloganeering against patriotic Americans who love our country, use your name-calling for the terrorist regime that has murdered Americans, tried to assassinate our president, chants death to America, and has lied its way toward a nuclear bomb,” Levin added before tweeting: “By the way, neocon is a pejorative for Jew. Unbelievable.”
It was this claim that using the term “neocon” is somehow antisemitic – both Levin and Witkoff are Jewish – that prompted a response from Carlson, who has become the “king of the isolationists” in the American conservative movement.
Carlson, who was fired from Fox News in 2023, said that his former employer “basically seems to turn its programming over to advocating for a war with Iran” before ridiculing Levin for his taking offense at Witkoff’s take on the “neocon element” in the GOP.
“So you have Mark Levin calling Steve Witkoff an anti-Semite. We’ve reached peak crazy, I mean, I think Witkoff is Jewish, right?” Carlson asked his guest Dave Smith, a comedian turned foreign policy critic.
“If Mark Levin is calling the Trump administration antisemitic, Steve Witkoff, we’re at the end of something and the beginning of something new,” Carlson added. “If you’re calling Steve Witkoff an anti-Semite on Twitter, like, you know you’re losing, right?”
Carlson, who said he didn’t call Levin because he would just be “scolded” by the “screaming” host, likely knew that the conservative pundit was going to return fire, especially since Levin spends much of his airtime raging at his critics. And that’s exactly what happened this week.
Midway through his syndicated radio show on Tuesday, Levin launched into an over-the-top tirade in which he repeatedly referred to his former Fox News cohort by the nickname deceased conservative radio star Rush Limbaugh bestowed on Carlson – Chatsworth Osborne Jr.
“So schmuck picks a fight with me, doesn’t call me,” Levin fumed. “You see, all the neocons are gone. So why do they keep using the word neoconservative? Notice they don’t use hawk, interventionist. Neocon! Why do they keep saying neocon? Because many of the neoconservatives were old time, left-wing, Democrat Jews!”
Continuing his explanation for why the term neocon is anti-Jewish, Levin said: “Chatsworth knows it. I know it, and many of the people that use that phrase either don’t know what they’re talking about, but in the magazines and on the internet, they know it. So they’re not going to say the Jews are dragging us into a war, they’ll say Israel is, Netanyahu is. They’re not gonna say the Jews this and the Jews that, so they use neocon.”
Levin proceeded to use the next few minutes to claim that wanting to stop the “Islamo-Nazi regime in Iran” means “you’re not a warmonger” but rather “a peacemaker, only to bring it back around to Carlson’s attacks on him.
“But I don’t have to pretend I’m Helen Keller! That I don’t see and I don’t hear, and neither do you! And neither do you. And there’s a whole pattern over there, with Chatsworth Osborne Jr., a whole pattern,” he raged.
“Now he’s free to do what he wants. I believe in free speech. Go ahead, buy a subscription. Do whatever you want, it’s perfectly fine by me. But don’t screw with me, you little bastard, by twisting my words,” Levin concluded. “And you should have picked up the phone because I would have cleared things up for you.”
This isn’t the first time that there’s been tension between Carlson and Levin. When they were both hosting Fox News shows, Levin took issue with the now-former primetime star for being a frequent source for mainstream journalists. At the time, Ben Smith – then a New York Times columnist – revealed that despite his self-portrayal as the sworn enemy of the media establishment, Carlson had regularly dished to reporters about Fox and Trump.
“Now, I could go further into this, I’m not going to. That is a serious misunderstanding of one’s role, of loyalty, and character. Let me leave it at that,” Levin said about Carlson in 2021.
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