Recriminations and infighting over former Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s podcast interview with far-right activist and provocateur Nick Fuentes are continuing to roil conservative political circles more than a week after its airing. The controversy has especially engulfed the conservative Heritage Foundation, whose president rushed to defend Mr. Carlson against charges that he had uncritically amplified the views of a purveyor of antisemitism.
On his popular show, Mr. Carlson, known for his often combative lines of inquiry, allowed Mr. Fuentes to rail against U.S. supporters of Israel and to voice anti-Jewish conspiracies. When Mr. Fuentes said Jews control the media and cited Rupert Murdoch, Mr. Carlson demurred. “Fox is not a Jewish business,” he said of his former employer. Mr. Fuentes shot back that Mr. Murdoch is an ally of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Later in the interview, Mr. Carlson, who has become highly critical of U.S. support for Israel, said pro-Israel Republicans such as former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, were “Christian Zionists” afflicted by a “brain virus.”
The subsequent fallout has become a window into fissures within a conservative movement shaped by President Donald Trump’s aggressive approach to politics, and an information environment with far fewer gatekeepers, giving new prominence to once-fringe voices and views. The row is exposing divisions over the boundaries of free speech, and the distinction between opposing cancel culture and providing a microphone for hate-based views.
Why We Wrote This
Fallout over Tucker Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes, a purveyor of antisemitism, is revealing divides in the conservative movement, shaped by an information environment with far fewer gatekeepers.
For Republican leaders, it raises a pointed question: whether uniting the right means turning a blind eye to offensive or even dangerous views within your own coalition in order to defeat leftists deemed to be a greater threat.
On Oct. 30, as criticism grew of Mr. Carlson and by extension of Heritage, which advertises on his show and hosts him at events, the influential think tank’s president, Kevin Roberts, released a short video. “We will always defend our friends against bad actors,” he said, accusing a “venomous coalition” of “globalists” of trying to cancel Mr. Carlson. Mr. Roberts said he abhorred much of what Mr. Fuentes said, but that it was better to “challenge ideas in debate” than to deny someone a platform.
His statement sparked internal dissent and public criticism from Heritage staffers, amid reports that donors and other supporters were also unhappy. Members of an antisemitism task force that Heritage set up two years ago, amid concerns over pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses that targeted Jewish students, resigned en masse. Critics identified antisemitic tropes in Mr. Roberts’s statement. He began to backtrack, demoting and then firing his chief of staff over the video, then apologizing at an all-employee meeting on Nov. 5.
In videos leaked from that meeting, several Heritage employees criticized Mr. Roberts and questioned the organization’s ethics. Defending Mr. Carlson and Mr. Fuentes “was the final straw for me,” said Rachel Greszler, an economist who joined Heritage 12 years ago. By defending people “without regard to their policies or their morals,” the organization had given credence to its critics, she said.
By then, several Republican lawmakers had forcefully denounced Mr. Fuentes and the amplification of hate speech. House Speaker Mike Johnson told National Review that “we have to call out antisemitism where it is. And I don’t think, whether it’s Tucker or anybody else, I don’t think we should be giving a platform to that speech.” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, whom Mr. Carlson called a “Christian Zionist,” told a Jewish Republican group that “if you sit there with someone who says Adolf Hitler was very, very cool and their mission is to combat and defeat ‘global Jewry,’ and you say nothing, then you are a coward, and you are complicit in that evil.”
Still, Vice President JD Vance raised eyebrows when he posted on X in the wake of last Tuesday’s Democratic election victories that his side needed to work harder to turn out its voters, adding: “The infighting is stupid.”
Republican officials and right-leaning institutions can and should exercise gatekeeping powers for the good of the movement, says Jesse Arm, vice president of external affairs at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank in New York City. “It should not be hard to condemn Nick Fuentes or, frankly, Tucker Carlson. What is the point of an institution if not to engage in gatekeeping and say, ‘This is who is a part of our movement and this is who is not.’”
On Nov. 6, right-wing broadcaster Megyn Kelly quizzed Mr. Carlson on her show about why he hadn’t challenged Mr. Fuentes about his holocaust denial and other bigotry. “Do your own interview the way that you want to do it. You’re not my editor,” Mr. Carlson shot back. “Buzz off.”
He said he chose to let interviewees speak for themselves so he could understand how they think. “I don’t need to prove that I’m a good person,” he told Ms. Kelly, who also used to work at Fox News.
That approach doesn’t sit well with some on the right. Victor Davis Hanson, a conservative historian and political commentator who is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, argues that if an interviewer risks giving unapologetic bigots a wider audience, then he or she must cross-examine them and refute their bigotry.
“Tucker Carlson did not use his formidable analytical skills to press Nick Fuentes,” Mr. Hanson says via email. “Not cancelling someone is not the same as providing a no-questions-asked free megaphone to expand their hate and audience share.”
A growing divide over Israel
That the furor centers around the platforming of a right-wing influencer with expressly anti-Jewish views isn’t a surprise. Divisions have grown within both parties over U.S. support for Israel and its war in Gaza, and stirred debate over when criticism of that support crosses over into antisemitism.
Mr. Carlson has been among those chiding the Trump administration for embroiling the U.S. in Middle East wars that these critics say aren’t America’s fight and undermine the principles of America First.
In June, just before the U.S. bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities in coordination with Israel, Mr. Carlson warned of the risks of U.S. military intervention. In response, Mr. Trump called him “kooky.” The two have long been close – some credit Mr. Carlson for helping to put Mr.Vance on the 2024 ticket – and Mr. Carlson, whose son works in the vice president’s press office, has generally been a cheerleader for the administration’s domestic agenda.
Mr. Fuentes, by contrast, has said he’s disappointed that Mr. Trump is insufficiently pro-white as president and evinces little loyalty toward his administration. In 2022, he went with rapper Kanye West to have dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Mr. Trump, who later said he didn’t know who Mr. Fuentes was. The dinner stirred controversy; Mr. West, known as Ye, has also become notorious for his antisemitic comments.
Mr. Fuentes, who gained notoriety after attending the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, doesn’t only disparage Jews. He recently said on his show that he didn’t want to “live around Blacks. Sorry! I want white kids and I don’t want my white kids bringing home Black people to marry.” He has also said women should stay at home to bear children.
While critics have lambasted Mr. Carlson for giving him a high-profile platform, Mr. Fuentes has his own channels to reach and mobilize his followers, known as groypers. Last year he was reinstated on X after Elon Musk overturned a previous ban, saying “it is better to have anti whatever out in the open to be rebutted than grow simmering in the darkness.” Since then, Mr. Fuentes’ followers on X have grown from 168,000 to more than 1 million. He hosts a regular show on Rumble, a popular site for right-wing influencers; clips of his shows frequently circulate on other social media.
Other MAGA influencers have more social-media followers than Mr. Fuentes, says Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters, a liberal watchdog group that monitors online speech. But his growing audience of mostly young men is active and engaged, not just online. “They inspire offline action,” he says.
This included a long-running feud with Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA who was assassinated on a university campus in Utah in September. Mr. Fuentes scorned Mr. Kirk as pro-Israel and insufficiently conservative and encouraged his followers to troll him at Turning Point events. After the assassination, there was even speculation that it was a groyper plot. (The alleged gunman, who is due to stand trial, had no known connection to Mr. Fuentes or his followers.)
By mobilizing his fans to go after Mr. Kirk and other conservatives, Mr. Fuentes is “not confronting them from the left, which is very easy to dismiss,” says Mr. Carusone. “It’s coming from a more raw and distilled version of right-wing politics and so it lands differently.”
At a Turning Point event in 2023, an audience member asked Mr. Kirk, “When are we going to build a big tent with nationalists like Jared Taylor and Nick Fuentes?” Mr. Kirk said, “I don’t align with Jew haters. … I’m not going to put up with Jew hatred in the conservative movement, in America.”
Fringe views elevated in a digital age
Some see parallels between the current rift on the right and previous eras of conservative pushback to bigotry on the fringes. In the 1960s, William F. Buckley sparred with the far-right John Birch Society, curbing its influence with mainstream conservatism.
But in an era of digital cacophony and online monetization, it’s much harder to police the boundaries and to draw firm lines. “Voices, individuals, ideas that were once widely condemned as the fringe have become more mainstream,” says Matt Dallek, a professor of politics at George Washington University who studies the far right.
Still, influencers like Mr. Fuentes who openly endorse antisemitism cross a line for many conservatives who say it mandates a response. “We’re seeing an internal war within MAGA over what people will tolerate. Fuentes represents the far edge of this racist wing,” says Professor Dallek.
The Hoover Institution’s Mr. Hanson argues that those pushing back against Mr. Fuentes and Mr. Carlson represent “by far the majority of conservatives and Republicans.”
There are also divisions within that camp over how, exactly, to push back. Should conservatives draw a sharp line, disavowing not only Mr. Fuentes but also his supporters? Or take a softer approach, nudging them back toward the mainstream with better messaging?
Mr. Arm, of the Manhattan Institute, says conservatives should seek to persuade Mr. Fuentes’ followers that his nihilistic ideas are wrong. But given that Mr. Fuentes relies on flippancy, sarcasm, and other humor, any serious conservative commentator may have limited success in rebutting him. “Comedians may be better counterpunchers in this fight,” Mr. Arm says.
To Mr. Carusone, who has long tracked Mr. Fuentes and other far-right influencers, the focus on his antisemitism may obscure the ways in which his other views fit snugly in Mr. Trump’s GOP, particularly on immigration, gender identity, and multiculturalism. “It’s not a far jump from what Fuentes has been saying for years about diversity not being our strength … to where the secretary of defense says that diversity is not our strength.”
