Around Halloween, appropriately, the online algorithms furnished an interview between Tucker Carlson & Nick Fuentes.
I watched it.
It’s one of the most disturbing things I’d seen in a very long time.
I was shocked by Fuentes’ shameless effrontery: he doesn’t even pretend to camouflage his insane views, including on the subject of women.
It was frightening when Tucker didn’t push back against Fuentes’ assertion that organised Jewry in America is a challenge to America’s problems and that Jews can’t be assimilated. The inference is that Jews have no place in America!
These online discussions may appear as the odd irritation but, as the recent National Review editorial (“A Time for Choosing on Antisemitism”) points out, it may be an attempt to reshape the discussions in the Republican party post-Trump.
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I think lot of conservatives tend to follow the “no enemies on the right” line. As strategically defensible as it may be, antisemitism is nature’s way of telling us that the holder of those views has an empty mind and a nasty heart.
Of all the brilliant minds Tucker could pick, he chooses some YouTuber/influencer whose sole contribution to conservatism is rehabilitating the worst despots of the 20th century and, all-the-while, blaming Jews for our problems.
I’m all for debate and discussion and I don’t believe in no-platforming people, but when you give such a clown softball-questions in an interview (while conducting such a nasty & argumentative interview with Ted Cruz earlier this year over Israel) - then your bias is fairly plain to see.
Almost seventy years ago, one of my heros, William F. Buckley Jr. expelled the Jew haters and the Birchers from the American conservative movement.
Buckley was an intellectual and a deep thinker. And sorely needed today.
Fuentes is a virus and Carlson is the carrier.
I also think JD Vance may be more sympathetic to Tucker than the National Review editors appreciate. As such, for me, I would prefer Marco Rubio getting the Trump endorsement in 2028.
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By The Editors
October 30, 2025 6:30 AM
Tucker Carlson, knee-deep already, has taken another step into the muck with a friendly interview with Nick Fuentes.
The issue isn’t merely that Carlson “platformed” a white-nationalist influencer.
This framing allows Carlson and his defenders to portray the interview and others like it as an effort at open debate, as a good-faith attempt at engagement with alternative views.
The deeper problem is that Carlson didn’t actually challenge any of Fuentes’s noxious views that he has spelled out quite clearly over the years. Fuentes has engaged in Holocaust denial, called Adolf Hitler “really f***ing cool,” and said that if his movement gained power, it would execute “perfidious Jews.”
Carlson didn’t even need to go back through old clips to find objectionable statements. In his appearance, Fuentes stated that the “big challenge” to unifying the country against tribal interests was “organized Jewry in America,” and he expressed admiration for Soviet butcher Joseph Stalin. He did not receive any pushback from Carlson.
It also can’t be said that Carlson’s interviewing style is simply to let his guests speak. In June, Carlson held a combative interview with Senator Ted Cruz that descended into an extended shouting match. Why would Carlson choose to take an oppositional tack to a senator who has been fighting for conservatism for decades, but not to a podcaster who praises Stalin? The obvious answer is that Fuentes is an avowed Jew-hater while Cruz is a staunch supporter of Israel.
Carlson stated during his interview that he thinks Cruz, Mike Huckabee, and other figures who are Christian and support Israel have been infected by a “brain virus.” About these “Christian Zionists,” he said: “I dislike them more than anybody. Because it’s Christian heresy, and I’m offended by that as a Christian.”
It would be easy to dismiss Carlson, and his now-extensive history of promoting antisemitism, as the handiwork of another personality desperate for attention in the online economy. But Carlson is one of the nation’s most prominent and influential commentators. After the death of Charlie Kirk, Carlson has become a leading speaker for the organization that Kirk founded, Turning Point USA. When Vice President JD Vance subbed in as a host on Kirk’s podcast after the assassination, Carlson was his guest.
Carlson’s sway, though, is currently limited by the fact that President Trump — who happens to like Jews and who has been the strongest supporter of Israel of any U.S. president in history — is in charge of the Republican Party and ultimately defines MAGA.
In June, Trump ignored Carlson and joined Israel’s effort to take out Iran’s nuclear program, which was successful in neutralizing a threat that had been looming over the Middle East for decades without any U.S. casualties. Carlson had predicted that it would trigger World War III and that it could kill thousands of Americans within a week. Trump dismissed him as “kooky Tucker Carlson.”
Trump won’t be around forever, though. Which is one reason that Carlson, Fuentes, Candace Owens, and other online influencers are pushing so hard to try and remake the Republican Party and the conservative movement into one that is hostile toward Israel and the Jewish people.
The idea that it should be seen as the America First position to oppose Israel and American Jewry is not only a moral abomination; it makes no sense. Israel is a technologically innovative, staunchly pro-American nation in the heart of a strategically important region. Over the past several years, with U.S. support, Israeli actions have weakened the anti-American terrorist group the Houthis; neutered Hezbollah (the terrorist group that slaughtered 241 U.S. servicemembers in the 1983 Marine Barracks bombing); and crippled the nuclear program of a nation that has for decades vowed “Death to America.” It isn’t pro-Israel protesters in the U.S. who are burning American flags and calling for the “total eradication of Western civilization” — it is the so-called pro-Palestine movement. It wasn’t Israelis who handed out candy to celebrate the September 11 attacks — that was Palestinians.
George Washington, in a famous letter to a Jewish congregation in Newport, R.I., in 1790, wrote, “May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants.” American Jews have enjoyed more security and freedom here than at any place in world history and rewarded that welcome by making positive contributions to the nation in just about every field imaginable. A version of America that is no longer safe for Jews to live in securely, and that is overtaken by anti-Israel zealots, is not an America that any conservative should want to live in.
It's the same old anti-Semitism that has plagued the West (and the Middle East) for centuries. It was driven underground and into disrepute for a while by the shock of the Holocaust, but eighty years later the Holocaust is passing out of living memory, and it's re-emerging.
ReplyDeleteHere in the US, Fuentes is widely recognized as a de facto Nazi. Carlson had to know exactly what he as doing by giving him a supportive platform. Evil opinions should not be censored, but they should be met with vigorous denunciation and refutation, and Carlson failed to do that.
Still, at least there are influential voices on the right who are willing to call this out for what it is. There is plenty of emergent anti-Semitism on the left, too, and almost no important figures on the left will condemn it or even acknowledge it. It's a very disturbing situation.