In October, 2025, Tucker Carlson posted an interview with Texas State Representative Steve Toth on his show, during which he thanked Toth for primarying Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R., Texas). Carlson told Toth that he believes that Toth will prevail over the incumbent Republican. Five months later, Toth proved Carlson right, ousting Crenshaw in Texas’s 2nd District’s GOP primary.
One year later, Toth told the Washington Reporter in an interview that he wants nothing to do with Carlson. When the Reporter asked Toth about his appearance on Carlson’s podcast, Toth’s initial response was simple: “I don’t remember the guy.”
When the Reporter followed up, Toth expanded with an extensive criticism of Carlson. “I wish I could tell you what is going on in his heart and in his mind,” Toth said. “When I met Tucker, he was a very disarming, very kind person. I really enjoyed meeting him and spending time with him.”
But now, he told the Reporter, “I, for the life of me, cannot understand what he’s doing, what path he’s on. It makes no sense to me at all. I can’t. He’s an enigma wrapped in a question mark surrounded by a conundrum. I just can’t figure the guy out. I really can’t. I don’t know how you call it anything more than what he’s amplified already, which is that he hates Jewish people. He hates the Jewish state. He can say he loves [Israel] because he’s visited it several times, but he has an open amount of disdain towards it.”
Toth has taken the opposite tack when it comes to both Israel and to radical Islam — one of the formative experiences he had was when Islamic terrorists decapitated American journalist Daniel Pearl.
Shortly after Pearl was beheaded on video, Toth heard a radio host exhort viewers to watch the scene, in all its horrors: the host said “that every American man needs to grow a pair and watch these people cut Daniel’s head off, because you need to see who these people are. You need to see who these people are, because you can’t appreciate what happened unless you watch it,” Toth said.
What happened, Toth explained, was like nothing he had ever seen. “It’s not like ‘oh, Daniel was alive and they cut his head off,’” he said. “You can’t appreciate that until you watch two people holding his head as he’s trying to struggle to speak and breathe as he’s gurgling through the blood that’s now going into his lungs and he’s coughing it up as they’re cutting his head off while they’re literally turning his head into a Pez dispenser. I’ve never seen anything like that. You can’t appreciate just this level of evil.”
“I could not do that,” Toth said. “I could kill a bad person, but I couldn’t do that to a bad person. I couldn’t. I’m not capable of that level of evil; it takes a demonic presence to be able to kill somebody that way and do that to them. Golda Meir said something back in the 1960s when she was Prime Minister of Israel. She said something along the lines of: ‘I don’t hate the PLO for killing Israeli children. I hate the PLO for making us kill your children, the Palestinians’ children,’ because their rules of engagement are such that they would hide behind women and children. They’d fire at Israeli troops, leaving Israelis no option but to fire back. And yet they’re firing behind the covers of women and children. That takes a different kind of evil, and the world has just not woken up to understand what we are fighting and the level of evil behind it. We’ve got to wake the hell up!”
That awakening continued on October 7th, 2023, for Toth and for so many around the world. Just weeks after Palestinian terrorists broke into southern Israel, Toth went to a private screening hosted by the Israeli government, in which “they made us sign waivers so that we wouldn’t sue the Israeli government for trauma after what we saw.”
“I saw the videos that Hamas took,” Toth said. “They sent GoPro videos back. They took iPhones off of the people they were about to kill, and then they did social media live broadcasts back to their families of how they were raping and killing people. And I saw it, and it’s the most disturbing thing I’ve ever seen in my life, because it was real. It wasn’t gratuitous violence. It was what you’d see in a terrible movie. You’d see this in the Kill Bill movies, for example. It was like a Quentin Tarantino movie, but it was real. It was awful what I saw.”
“It was probably the most disturbing thing that I have ever seen,” Toth said. “This is post-October 7th, maybe two weeks, three weeks later. In one scene, there are 18 teenage girls huddled against a wall, and one of them was filming them. I don’t know if she was live streaming, hoping that somebody would see her, or what the deal was, and you heard gunshots, and then the gunshots stopped, and they were huddled crying, and then you saw the Hamas terrorists come in, and then it was cut off, and then the Hamas guys who had taken their phones started recording again. They were in piles against the wall, having been raped, sodomized, half dressed, and these guys were sitting around smoking cigarettes, laughing about the fact that they had just screwed and raped these girls, these little girls.”
“Then,” Toth continued, “they showed a picture of a woman who was pulled into the Gaza Strip. She’d been butt raped by several men. The lower half of her body was just covered in blood, and she was thrown into a Jeep. And Tucker thinks that the Jewish people are, in some ways, doing something horrific to the people of Gaza. I’m sorry, I’m just not there. Something’s desperately wrong with you if you can’t appreciate what was done to these people and why they want to stop this.”
Below is a transcript of our interview with Steve Toth, lightly edited for clarity:
Washington Reporter:
Steve, tell me how you are looking at the final weeks of the 2026 midterms as a Republican candidate for Congress.
Steve Toth:
Now’s the time when people are finally starting to plug in to the fact that there’s an election coming up on November 3, and they’re just starting to pay attention. It’s critically important that we’re on message and that we’re making ourselves available, as we always have. One of the things that we’ve done better than anybody in the Texas Legislature over the past ten years that I’ve been there is being accessible; no one will tell you that there is a representative out there who has made himself more accessible than I have and that my team has. I have the most incredible team of servants that just love doing constituency work. They’re amazing.
Washington Reporter:
You served with James Talarico in the legislature. Tell me about your experience with him.
Steve Toth:
This is the most disconnected person from reality I have ever met in my life, and I don’t know of anybody who is more proficient in lying than this guy. Everything he’s claiming to be now is 180 degrees opposite from who he was in the legislature. For him to now say that he didn’t support the gender transitioning of minors is a complete lie. There is a whole lie that James Talarico has been telling people and buying into and telling other folks about whether you would rather have a live son or a dead daughter. He knows that’s garbage because we’ve read the studies to him on the House floor about the European studies; they’re 10, 15, 20 years down the road, and he’s heard all of this. Why is it that these guys have such an agenda to want to get these kids to transition? It’s just plain evil.
Washington Reporter:
Talarico burst onto the national stage when he flew to D.C. with several of his other colleagues to deny quorum in the Texas legislature; did you ever interact with him on a personal level?
Steve Toth:
He’s not a nice person. I’m trying to artfully slide into this. I had a piece of legislation that dealt with children who struggle with reading. 80 percent of the people in prisons across the United States are functionally illiterate. 75 percent of that population is dyslexic. It’s the major cause of illiteracy in the United States today. Roughly a third, 35 percent, of the children in the United States are reading at grade level. Those are statistics. I had legislation that addressed this, and I talked about my story and my struggle to read. He actually used it against me on the House floor once publicly. He said, ‘how many books have you read about critical race theory? Oh, that’s right, you can’t read.’ I mean, who does that? That’s seventh grade BS. He’s that kind of of nasty. He’s just a very nasty, mean person. He tries to come across as this sweet, lovable guy. That is just not who this man is. He is a very caustic, angry, angry young man.
Washington Reporter:
What have been your experiences with Ken Paxton, on the flip side?
Steve Toth:
Ken’s a guy who, when he sits down to do something, he just gets it done, he knocks it out. He’s quiet. He’s like a dog with a bone. When he gets it, he’s not going to let it go until he wins, and that’s how he’s been. He’s fought big social media, big pharma. He’s tenacious and just gets it done.
Washington Reporter:
What else have you seen from him as AG that informs how you think he would legislate as a senator?
Steve Toth:
He’ll absolutely put us first. One of the things that we really love about Trump is that Trump doesn’t give two craps about what you think of him. That’s the worst thing about him, and that’s the best thing about him. He’s just going to do it. He’s just going to do the right thing because he can’t be bought. Ken can’t be bought. Look, big pharma, big business, big Republican Party, have all opposed him. The Republican Party’s been after Ken ever since he got into the legislature, and they’ve consistently come after him. I was part of the House when they laid out this fictitious, ridiculous, impeachment thing against him. It was a total crock of crap. Not one single charge held any water, and yet they threw this cabal at him. The Republican Party of Texas did this. Surely, out of 17 impeachment indictments, one of them would stick, or at least closely would stick, or maybe get a couple votes. Nothing. It was complete BS, and that’s because they are scared stiff of Ken because Ken can’t be bought, and he can’t be influenced by them.
Washington Reporter:
What lessons do you feel like Texas should show America based on the decision by the Republican Party and by President Trump to pick Dallas for their historic convention?
Steve Toth:
This is something that I heard many years ago by Glenn Beck: he said that Texans don’t think they’re better than everybody else. They just think they do America better than anybody else, and that’s truly what the spirit of Texas is. We do liberty, we do justice, we do the rights of free men and women better than anybody else, and that’s why I’m so grateful that the president chose Texas to do this midterm convention.
Washington Reporter:
What are the top issues that you are now hearing about from voters in Texas’s 2nd District as you go about campaigning?
Steve Toth:
Affordability, affordability, and affordability. There are a lot of things that play into affordability, like closing the border. 53 percent of the babies born in the state of Texas are Medicaid births, and if we continue to have people pour across the border to have babies, that is going to drive up Medicaid costs. 50 years ago, Medicaid was 3 percent of our budget. Now it’s a third of our budget. Your car insurance also ties into both affordability and to the border. Someone ran into me several years ago. Why is car insurance so expensive? You’ve got a ton of people on the road who are here illegally who don’t have any auto insurance whatsoever, and we all end up paying the cost of that. Auto insurance is going through the freaking roof right now, and we need some tort reform too, which because homeowners’ insurance is just ridiculously expensive. We’ve got a lot of people who are here illegally, and that ties into public education all it adds to the cost of your local property taxes. Your local property taxes are going to have to absorb kids who are here illegally, whose parents don’t pay taxes.
Washington Reporter:
You had dyslexia growing up in an era when people probably didn’t know what that meant, and that’s been a throughline of your political career in the Texas state legislature, and it’s something that you’re talking about on the campaign trail. How is that something that you want to work on in Congress?
Steve Toth:
The vast majority of the states are out of alignment and are in violation of the Department of Education as it relates to parents having the right to have their kids tested for dyslexia, and then to get services for them. Here’s what makes me absolutely crazy: if we drive out of Houston and we’re to drive to Austin, about two thirds of the way there, three quarters of the way there, you come to Giddings, Texas, where they have a little Buc-ee’s. You know what Buc-ee’s is, right?
Washington Reporter:
I went to the one in Terrell when I was in town for the RNC.
Steve Toth:
Nice. That’s a nice one. About five minutes before you hit Giddings on the left, you can go to the Giddings Institute. It’s a maximum security prison for kids. And what’s crazy is that they run a school out of it, and these are teenagers, and these are young men who dropped out of high school anywhere between eighth grade and sophomore year in high school, and 99 percent of them can’t read, can’t do basic math, and they’re showing them how to build houses, they’re showing them how to repair cars, they’re showing them electronics, they’re showing them how to weld. They’re learning all the cool things that young people would love to learn who aren’t necessarily STEM students. These kids are totally digging it, and it makes no damn sense to me. Why are we waiting till kids are in prison to teach them a life skill and to give them the things necessary to help them be successful in life? Why are we doing this? We have sold our fricking souls to the teachers’ unions, and it makes no sense. I’m not blaming the average teacher out there because the average teacher gets this and cares about these kids deeply. But the education cartel does not care about kids. They only care about the institutions and preserving and protecting and defending mediocrity in our education system in the United States, and I want to go to Washington, D.C. and absolutely tear that down.
Washington Reporter:
Can you tell me about how the Houston floods influenced your decision to get involved in politics? This was a reason why you wanted to run for Congress, right?
Steve Toth:
Ten years have passed since Hurricane Harvey, where we lives that never, never should have been lost. Everything that possibly could go wrong through stupidity did go wrong through stupidity. And ten years since then, nearly $200 million has been brought back, and yet I can’t point to one solid thing that’s been remedied since then. We still have open sand pits that, when high amounts of water runs through them, they pick up sand and deposit into the West Fork of the San Jacinto River, which, when an additional heavy rain comes, it causes flooding. We still have significantly more development over the past ten years along the West Fork of the San Jacinto River, which means that if another Harvey hit, the catastrophe would be significantly worse than it was ten years ago. We still have Lake Houston, which is below the level of Lake Conroe. There’s a 100 foot elevation change between Lake Conroe and Lake Houston, and yet Lake Conroe can release water at 80,000 cubic feet per second, whereas Lake Houston can only release water at about 30,000 cubic feet per second, which means that what’s in between is going to back up and flood, which is Kingwood and the Tascasita. Nothing has been done, and we’re working with local officials right now to put everybody on the same page, and seriously, it’s unbelievable. No one’s ever done this. No one’s ever sat down and said, ‘let’s get the city of Houston. Let’s get the state legislators. Let’s get Harris County people, Montgomery County people, and then people at the federal level involved in coming up with a solution, so that we’re all working together to get it done.’ It’s never been done! It’s never been done, and that’s my goal. We’re already working on it. We had a meeting recently with local elected officials, state elected officials, and FEMA. FEMA had never been brought into this issue. Why is it that we bring FEMA in to clean the mess up? Why don’t we bring FEMA in before there’s a disaster, and say, ‘what’re your thoughts on how to make this a less flood-prone area?’
Washington Reporter:
Should you win, as you’re favored to do, you want to join the Freedom Caucus; one of their priorities has been codifying a lot of Trump’s executive orders, especially when it relates to border security. Can you give me a sense first off of how the border has looked compared to Trump, compared to Biden?
Steve Toth:
I can’t count the number of times that I’ve been down at the border over the years, and it was back in 2013 when I said that’s it’s not an immigration issue; it’s an invasion issue. I called it an invasion back in 2013 when I had been down there multiple times, and what I saw under the Biden administration, the four years that he was in office, let me tell you: the number of people that was flooding, just flooding, across the border, was out of control. Now you go down there, and it’s a ghost town. You would go into the airport in El Paso, you’d go into the airport in any border area, and it would be flooded with illegals who just wanted a place to put their head. They wanted a place to get cool. They wanted a place to get water. It was a human trafficking nightmare; so many honest and decent people were just looking for a better opportunity in life were being exploited by the cartel for their gain and benefit. It’s terrible. It’s awful.
Washington Reporter:
What are the other executive orders not related to the border that Trump has signed that you want to make sure Congress codifies starting next year that haven’t been codified yet?
Steve Toth:
My main focus is really going to be the border, and I also want to see us move the ball forward on Medicaid, sending a block grant back to the states. I know Trump has talked about this. I don’t know that we’ve done a lot on it yet, but we need to send Medicaid back to the states in the form of a block grant. It’s critically important. Texas knows better than Washington, D.C., just like how Ohio knows better than Washington, D.C. Just like how the state of Washington knows more about how to best use their Medicaid dollars and what’s necessary and what’s needed. This is something I’ve been calling for all the way back to when Kevin Brady was in Congress. We need Medicaid to come back to our state in the form of a block grant. We’re going to have to codify it legislatively. There are some more things too. I want to see us make sure that the Democrats can’t shut down the Keystone pipeline again. I want to make sure that the Democrats can’t shut down the exportation of liquid natural gas. When Joe Biden cut down the exportation of LNG, first off, he didn’t even know about it, which is crazy. I know Mike Johnson, and I sat with Mike, and the Speaker told me that when when he asked the president about it, Biden said, ‘I never did that. We just did a study. We’re just doing a study to look at the possibility.’ But the reality was no, Biden did it. When Biden took the leading producer of liquid natural gas off the market, we were the leading producer of natural gas and the leading exporter of LNG, but Biden restricted the world’s supply of LNG, which forced the value of LNG to go up 250 percent, and we’re paying for that today. We are paying for that still today; that was 18.9 percent inflation over the four year period that Biden was in office. And then of course to close down the Keystone Pipeline, and to close down exploration. The price of oil is based on two things: it’s based on speculation, and it’s based on supply and demand. When you’ve got a president in office who’s curtailing LNG exporting and exploration as well as oil and gas, one of those legs of the stool, which is speculation, is going to drive the price way up.
Washington Reporter:
I first became aware of your campaign when you did an interview with Tucker Carlson.
Steve Toth:
I’m sorry, who did you mention?
Washington Reporter:
Tucker Carlson.
Steve Toth:
I don’t remember the guy.
Washington Reporter:
What do you make of Tucker’s agenda, in that case? What’s happened to him?
Steve Toth:
I wish I could tell you what is going on in his heart and in his mind. When I met Tucker, he was a very disarming, very kind person. I really enjoyed meeting him and spending time with him. I, for the life of me, cannot understand what he’s doing, what path he’s on. It makes no sense to me at all. I can’t. He’s an enigma wrapped in a question mark surrounded by a conundrum. I just can’t figure the guy out. I really can’t. I don’t know how you call it anything more than what he’s amplified already, which is that he hates Jewish people. He hates the Jewish state; he can say he loves it because he’s visited it several times, but he has an open amount of disdain towards it. I saw what happened on October 7th. I saw the videos that Hamas took; they sent GoPro videos back. They took iPhones off of the people they were about to kill, and then they did social media live broadcasts back to their families of how they were raping and killing people. And I saw it, and it’s the most disturbing thing I’ve ever seen in my life, because it was real. It wasn’t gratuitous violence. It was what you’d see in a terrible movie. You’d see this in the Kill Bill movies, for example. It was like a Quentin Tarantino movie, but it was real. It was awful what I saw. They made us sign waivers so that we wouldn’t sue the Israeli government for trauma after what we saw. It was probably the most disturbing thing that I have ever seen. This is post-October 7th, maybe two weeks, three weeks later. In one scene, there are 18 teenage girls huddled against a wall, and one of them was filming them. I don’t know if she was live streaming, hoping that somebody would see her, or what the deal was, and you heard gunshots, and then the gunshots stopped, and they were huddled crying, and then you saw the Hamas terrorists come in, and then it was cut off, and then the Hamas guys who had taken their phones started recording again. They were in piles against the wall, having been raped, sodomized, half dressed, and these guys were sitting around smoking cigarettes, laughing about the fact that they had just screwed and raped these girls, these little girls. And then they showed a picture of a woman who was pulled into the Gaza Strip. She’d been butt raped by several men. The lower half of her body was just covered in blood, and she was thrown into a Jeep. And Tucker thinks that the Jewish people are, in some ways, doing something horrific to the people of Gaza. I’m sorry, I’m just not there. Something’s desperately wrong with you if you can’t appreciate what was done to these people and why they want to stop this.
Washington Reporter:
Steve, why was that important for you to watch? Is it because of your background as a minister?
Steve Toth:
Do you remember Daniel Pearl?
Washington Reporter:
Yes, of course. The gym at my Jewish high school is named after him.
Steve Toth:
I have a Jewish heritage, but that’s not why. That’s not why I watched it. I can’t remember who was on the radio after Pearl was murdered, but he said that he had watched Daniel’s beheading, and he said that every American man needs to grow a pair and watch these people cut Daniel’s head off, because you need to see who these people are. You need to see who these people are, because you can’t appreciate what happened unless you watch it. It’s not like ‘oh, Daniel was alive and they cut his head off.’ You can’t appreciate that until you watch two people holding his head as he’s trying to struggle to speak and breathe as he’s gurgling through the blood that’s now going into his lungs and he’s coughing it up as they’re cutting his head off while they’re literally turning his head into a Pez dispenser. I’ve never seen anything like that. You can’t appreciate just this level of evil. I could not do that. I could kill a bad person, but I couldn’t do that to a bad person. I couldn’t. I’m not capable of that level of evil; it takes a demonic presence to be able to kill somebody that way and do that to them. Golda Meir said something back in the 1960s when she was Prime Minister of Israel. She said something along the lines of: ‘I don’t hate the PLO for killing Israeli children. I hate the PLO for making us kill your children, the Palestinians’ children,’ because their rules of engagement are such that they would hide behind women and children. They’d fire at Israeli troops, leaving Israelis no option but to fire back. And yet they’re firing behind the covers of women and children. That takes a different kind of evil, and the world has just not woken up to understand what we are fighting and the level of evil behind it. We’ve got to wake the hell up!
Washington Reporter:
Steve, that was incredibly powerful. Can we end this interview by you telling me a fun fact about yourself?
Steve Toth:
I have two sets of twin grandbabies.
Washington Reporter:
Thank you so much for your time, Steve.
