There are men who discover courage only after the cameras arrive.
Jay Collins appears to suffer from the opposite problem.
When Americans were trapped in Israel under Iranian missile fire, he didnt retreat into the comfortable bureaucracy of concern. He picked up the phone, asked where they were, and went into the region to help bring them home.
Wendy Nissan whom I recently had the pleasure of meeting is a mother whose son was there and here she recalls how Jay called him directly:
“Where are you? I’m coming to get you.”
That's not the language of performance politics.
That is for those of us familiar with it: duty, stated plainly.
And in an age that's overrun by ornamental statesmen, podcast generals and committee-room lions, it's worth pausing when a man runs towards danger before asking whether the lighting is favorable.
Watch this Florida mother explain what leadership looked like when her son needed it most.
Support @JayCollinsFL for governor at https://t.co/WJ3ek3kxJc and follow @CollinsWarRoom to show your support.
@ScottforFlorida@Republicans@JoeGruters What has he done? How is he doing a great job? Does he have a candidate trained in every district of republicans that will not vote for save America? And ready to run those campaigns primary? What is he doing?
@Georgesantos@Georgesantos where is @JoeGruters and why isn’t he telling every single GOP senator that they will be primaried if they don’t pass it now! ????
When I sat down with Tucker Carlson on Wednesday, I was expecting a thoughtful conversation and that he would ask questions and give me the opportunity to actually respond--just like he did with the little Nazi sympathizer Nick Fuentes or the guy who thought Hitler was the good guy and Churchill the bad guy. What I wasn't anticipating was a lengthy series of questions where he seemed to be insinuating that the Jews of today aren't really same people as the Jews of the Bible.
I'll first just say something I didn't think to say to Tucker, which is that Ashkenazi Jews, meaning those who families had spent centuries in Europe, are a minority of Israel's Jewish population, only maybe 35-40%. There are far more Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews inside Israel.
But there's a good reason, as it turns out, that I had never encountered this theory that Tucker kept pushing on. That’s because it comes from some of the darkest realms of the Internet and social media.
I think it's important to take a moment now and educate Tucker and anyone else who might get sucked in by this dangerous conspiracy theory, just as I have been educated this week.
I'm sharing this information because it has been weaponized by very bad people to delegitimize Jews and strip them of their history.
It's an idea that gained traction in the 80's and 90's with David Duke and other Klansmen and neo-Nazis. It has really caught fire in recent years on the Internet and social media, mostly from some of the most overt anti-Semites and Jew haters you can find.
I don’t know why Tucker was so fixated on this, and I'm certainly not saying he knew the origins of this conspiracy theory. I don't know what's in his heart or what he was thinking.
But I do know that the discredited idea that most Ashkenazi or European Jews descended from the ancient Turkic kingdom of Khazaria is bunk. It's also been weaponized by people trying to deligitimize Jews, to strip them of their history, and to call them "imposters" or "fake Jews."
This odious conspiracy theory is peddled by the likes of Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes and by people who love David Duke, as well as Islamist accounts that make up false smears about Israel non-stop and are run out of countries like Pakistan and Turkey.
But we know from genetics and rich volumes of written literature that the Jews of today can trace their lineage back thousands of years to the Israel and the Jewish people of the Bible.
They are as connected together as genetics tell us that the ancient Khazar kingdom is to people living today in Turkey.
And if Tucker wants to tour more than Ben-Gurion Airport on his next trip to Israel, I'm happy to show him places where Jews have lived going back to the time of Jesus Christ and even earlier.
I sincerely hope Tucker will let me know when he actually wants to learn facts about the land and people. Asking me about conspiracy theories should remain on the fringes and not be the heart of the conversation.