Co-founder of The Daily Wire Jeremy Boreing recently shared a clip of an interview he did in which he criticized Tucker Carlson and his foreign policy views:

As Tucker’s attacks on the Trump Administration and the traditional conservative base become more pronounced, the electoral future of the American Right may come down to one all-important question: Do the radical voices that claim JD Vance actually have a claim on JD Vance?

My… pic.twitter.com/IChHLgyY4w

— Jeremy Boreing (@JeremyDBoreing) February 23, 2026

This happened right before President Donald Trump’s decision to launch a U.S. war against Iran, of which Carlson has been a top conservative critic.

Boreing was talking about the personal friendship between the vice president and Carlson.

But what did Boreing mean by saying that supposed “radical voice” Carlson was “attacking” the Trump administration and the “traditional conservative base?”

Libertarian Institute Senior Fellow Tom Woods had a response:

Conservatism, Inc., which has conserved nothing, is not the “traditional conservative base.” Boreing the wokester allows us to make tame observations like “the ’60s were bad,” but we don’t need to revisit any of the big questions because we got them all right the first time https://t.co/OYugAVldHe

— Tom Woods (@ThomasEWoods) February 24, 2026

Woods appeared to say that Boreing was part of a conservative establishment that saw itself as gatekeepers who got to define what the “traditional conservative base” is.

The Ron Paul Institute’s Executive Director Dan McAdams also replied to Boreing:

But you aren’t the “traditional conservative base.” That is the point. You neocons have hijacked the conservative movement with a profoundly anti-conservative ideology. Tucker is part of the effort to get it back. https://t.co/MPkxksSYxw

— Daniel McAdams (@DanielLMcAdams) February 23, 2026

Carlson’s recent interview with U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee was a combative exchange in which many believed Huckabee performed poorly in rationalizing the approaching U.S. war with Iran and also how the Baptist preacher presented his Christian Zionist theology that clearly, by his own admission, informed his foreign policy positions. Carlson conducted the interview after President Trump had reportedly told Carlson and other conservatives to tone down their rhetoric regarding Israel.

Carlson argued that America’s interests should come first and that included the U.S. not starting a war of choice with Iran. Huckabee’s position was that a U.S. war with Iran was in the American national interest because it was also in Israel’s interest, combining the two interests with his own evangelical biblical stamp of approval.

Carlson was representing the “America First” position once espoused by Trump and Vance. Huckabee represented the Israel First position, which he tried to pass off as the true America First position that few intellectually honest viewers of the interview bought.

Boreing is a longtime pro-Israel, pro-war with Iran hawk, as is his fellow Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro. Their warped worldview is one neocons have long tried to pass off as just plain, old traditional American conservatism that seeks to militarily spread U.S. democracy and dominance around the globe.

But this is false. Neoconservatism is not the whole of traditional American conservatism. Not even close.

American conservatism is a broad and deep history, but one might begin that journey with the first American president, George Washington, who warned his new country in his farewell address to avoid “foreign entanglements.” Neoconservatives’ religion is to embroil the U.S. in entanglements abroad.

America’s sixth president, John Quincy Adams, famously advised his countrymen as secretary of state not to go abroad seeking “monsters to destroy.” Neocons see every foreign adversary as a monster that needs destroying by the United States

Fast forward to President Ronald Reagan, a Republican icon who defined what it meant to be a conservative in his era and whose legacy neoconservatives have long tried to claim despite being at odds with him in his own time precisely over foreign policy.

Despite their claims, Reagan was no neocon. Fed up with this rewriting of history by neocons, former American Conservative Union President head David Keene once said:

“Reagan resorted to military force far less often than many of those who came before him or who have since occupied the Oval Office…After the [1983] assault on the Marine barracks in Lebanon, it was questioning the wisdom of U.S. involvement that led Reagan to withdraw our troops rather than dig in. He found no good strategic reason to give our regional enemies inviting U.S. targets.”

“Can one imagine one of today’s neoconservative absolutists backing away from any fight anywhere?” Keene asked.

No, one can’t.

The current American president once ran on a platform of ending “endless wars” and at the beginning of his second term declared that the neocon era was over. It now looks like Trump has fulfilled Boreing and Shapiro’s wish rather than stick to his original promise of America First.

Neoconservatives dominated the conservative movement the most during the reign of President George W. Bush, whose 2003 Iraq war is considered a pinnacle neocon success and also one of America’s worst foreign policy mistakes ever. Neocons today are eager to repeat that mistake with Iran, a country more than three times the size of Iraq.

The conservative movement before World War II was largely defined by Americans who sought to stay out of Europe’s wars, harkening back to George Washington’s early warning, something that changed after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941. The late antiwar activist Justin Raimondo chronicled that pre-war conservative movement in his 1993 book Reclaiming the American Right.

When Pat Buchanan ran for president in 1992, 1996, and 2000, he did so explicitly as an antiwar conservative in opposition to the neocons. The same was true of libertarian Republican Congressman Ron Paul’s 2008 and 2012 popular presidential campaigns.

When Buchanan wrote the foreword to Raimondo’s book, he said:

“Two traditions stand head-to-head, contending for the future of the… movement. One piously holds out the promise of enterprise zones from South Central Los Angeles to Mogadishu, while the other dares utter the forbidden phrase, America First! Written in defense of, and in the style of, the dead lions of the Old Right whom Justin Raimondo reveres, Reclaiming the American Right is not about olive branches; it is about conflict, about taking back the movement, about taking back America.”

Buchanan wrote these words thirty-three years ago. Ten years later, he would found a magazine (where I’m a contributor) dedicated to traditional antiwar conservatism on the eve of the Iraq war, The American Conservative, precisely to “take back the movement.”

Then, and now, there was a great battle between neoconservatives and traditional conservatives over who would define the American right, with the neocons being the relative newcomers. Tucker Carlson is a leading champion of traditional conservatives today and is arguably the most popular and influential conservative voice in the United States.

Boreing said of vice president Vance, “He has not repudiated Tucker, as Tucker’s rhetoric has gotten more and more and more outside of any traditional American conservatism.”

Tucker Carlson is couched deeply in the vein of the oldest strain of historic, traditional American conservatism.

Jeremy Boreing and his friends are couched in something else.