Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Nick Fuentes, the Holocaust-denying white nationalist, has exposed a rupture on the right. The divide is between conservatives who would allow once-fringe views in the GOP coalition and those who reject Fuentes’ overt antisemitism.
The Carlson-Fuentes chat was “one of the most dangerous interviews ever in MAGA media,” Will Sommer said at The Bulwark. The country must overcome the challenge of “organized Jewry in America,” Fuentes told the former Fox News host. Such incendiary claims are a “catastrophe for more traditional conservative media figures,” Sommer said, and have drawn rebukes from Breitbart’s Joel Pollak, The Daily Wire’s Andrew Klavan and writer Rod Dreher. (On Monday, conservative influencer Ben Shapiro posted a podcast episode titled “Tucker Carlson Sabotages America.”) By giving Fuentes a platform, Carlson “just accelerated the right’s already prominent tilt toward authoritarianism and hate.”
Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts threw in his lot with Carlson on Thursday, said Politico. Fuentes’ views may be abhorrent “but canceling him is not the answer, either,” Roberts said in a video posted to X. The interview was not an isolated moment, coming after a “string of antisemitic incidents on the right” that included the revelation of racist comments on a Young Republicans group text, said Politico. The trend has “broadly divided” the Republican Party. Antisemitism is “rising on the right in a way I have never seen,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said recently.
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Mainstreaming antisemitism
“The Groypers are at the gate,” Peter Laffin said at The Washington Examiner, using a term for Fuentes’ racist followers. Heritage’s Roberts compounded the problem with his public statement, which lent “credence to Fuentes’ and Carlson’s alt-right fever dream.” Groypers are threatening to take over the right and the “conservative movement, led by Roberts, is waving the white flag.”
Jewish conservatives “believe that Tucker Carlson is the most dangerous man in America to Jews,” conservative writer Rod Dreher said at his newsletter. That is because Carlson is the “most important mainstreamer of antisemitism on the right.” President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance could curtail the trend “by forthrightly denouncing it.” For conservatives and Christians, it is “time to find your courage” and push back now.
Fuentes is “shaping up to be the year’s major conservative breakout star” and is “clearly steering the right toward a wholesale embrace of bigotry,” Robby Soave said at Reason. The problem for his conservative critics is “their side is clearly losing.” Refusing to engage with him will not work, however. That would simply make his arguments “seem powerful, hypnotic and ultimately more appealing.”
Hostile toward Israel
Carlson, Fuentes and other influencers are trying to make the GOP “hostile toward Israel and the Jewish people,” National Review said in an editorial. But a version of America that is run by “anti-Israel zealots” is not one “any conservative should want to live in.”
The divide between Fuentes and conservatives is “narrower than it has ever been,” Ali Breland said at The Atlantic. His entry into the MAGA mainstream means his visions for a reactionary party “are closer than ever to being realized.”
