That spin is baffling. The topic of his Tucker Carlson interview was mainly Israel at first, before Ramaswamy focused on the lack of moral outrage about the Azerbaijan–Armenian conflict. And then Ramaswamy said American politicians speak “exactly the way they do” — meaning what they talk about and what they don’t talk about — because of corrupting financial influences. There was no special carveout for Israel from this accusation in his Carlson interview, but there apparently is now.

The logic of Ramaswamy’s current position is also baffling. Does Ramaswamy think that Israel has a weaker lobby than Ukraine and Azerbaijan? “I don’t know the answer to that question,” McLaughlin said. “He’s never brought up the lobbying influences of Israel.” According to OpenSecrets, pro-Israel lobbying is about $4 million a year — that’s 0.1 percent of all lobbying expenditures. Azerbaijan spends about $480,000 — about 0.01 percent of all lobbying expenditures. Both amounts are a pittance. But Russian interests, OpenSecrets reported in February 2022, “reported spending about $182 million on lobbying, foreign influence operations and propaganda in the U.S. since 2016.”

As for Ramaswamy’s complaints about “selective moral outrage” with regard to Ukraine, Israel, and Armenia, I told McLaughlin I couldn’t find any tweets or press releases from Ramaswamy mentioning the Azerbaijan–Armenia conflict, which erupted on September 19, before his October 9 interview with Tucker Carlson.

[This guy’s a clown show. The “Azerbaijani lobby” barely buys lunch in DC, and Israel’s spending is a pittance. Ramaswamy has spent too much time listening and then amplifying the fever swamps, and got caught at it. Now he wants to blame everyone else for grasping precisely what he meant to say. Maybe he’s not an anti-Semite, but he’s a political dilettante and a fool. — Ed]