This one is different from most of the other American Nazi stories we’ve looked at recently (see here and here).
Those stories were about the exposure of beliefs and behaviors that people had tried to keep hidden. People had praised Hitler or celebrated Nazism or agreed with its antisemitic or white supremacist ideology, but they had done so in private, when no one else was around except for others who they knew agreed with them. But then — one way or another — that private behavior was revealed to the public.
But this story isn’t about secret Nazis having their dark secrets exposed. This is a story about proudly public Nazis being given a platform to persuade and convert others to their cause.
What happened was that former Fox News host Tucker Carlson sat down for a long, friendly interview with Nick Fuentes — the Neo-Nazi, openly white supremacist, male-supremacist, and antisemitic podcaster and leader of the far-right “Groyper” movement.
And then, after Carlson was criticized for this, the president of the Heritage Foundation stepped in to defend him — and thus to defend Fuentes — saying Republicans ought to “be focusing on our political adversaries on the left, not attacking our friends on the right.”
Will Sommer at the Bulwark, wrote about the upheaval Carlson’s chat with Fuentes created — “One of the Most Dangerous Interviews Ever in MAGA Media.” The evening after Sommer wrote that, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts weighed in to say that the most important Republican Party think tank was siding with Carlson. Zach Beauchamp covered that for Vox, “The GOP’s top think tank just defended an open Nazi.”
Both Sommer and Beauchamp give plenty of space for the voices of those Sommer describes as “more traditional conservative figures” — very conservative, very Republican folks who are very angry with Carlson and the Heritage Foundation for welcoming Fuentes’ explicitly Nazi beliefs into the MAGA coalition.
Here’s Sommer:
Tucker Carlson interviewed white nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes on Monday, sitting politely as Fuentes criticized the power of “organized Jewry in America.” The right-wing internet has been in turmoil ever since.
Suddenly, nothing — including the racism, Holocaust denialism, and antisemitism Fuentes has championed — seems to be too hot for MAGA media to embrace.
That amounts to a catastrophe for more traditional conservative media figures. Breitbart’s Joel Pollak declared that the claims Fuentes made that Carlson left unchallenged amounted to “the foundation of Nazism.” The Daily Wire’s Andrew Klavan said that Carlson’s embrace of Fuentes would doom the right. Writer Rod Dreher wrote that Jewish friends had told him Fuentes is “the most dangerous man in America to Jews.”
None of those critics has a sliver of the audience and momentum that Fuentes enjoys—both of which will no doubt continue to grow now that Carlson has welcomed him as a reasonable figure worthy of his even larger platform. (Fuentes has 1 million followers on X; Carlson has 16.7 million.) And that’s precisely why anyone in the Republican party with a shred of principle left is sounding the alarm. Because, at the most fundamental level, Carlson has just accelerated the right’s already prominent tilt toward authoritarianism and hate.
Here’s Beauchamp:
On Thursday night, the president of the Heritage Foundation — the MAGA right’s leading think tank — welcomed an open Nazi into his political coalition.
You might think I am exaggerating. I assure you I am not. The Nazi in question here, podcaster Nick Fuentes, has described Adolf Hitler as “really fucking cool” and said “perfidious Jews” must “be given the death penalty” after “we take power.”
And on Thursday, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts released a video defending this person’s inclusion in polite-right politics: describing Fuentes not as a hate-monger to be banished from the decent right, but as a coalition member whose view of Jews-as-evil-traitors should be politely debated. …
Now, prominent conservative figures — like writers Erick Erickson and Rod Dreher — are aghast, raging against Fuentes’ newfound acceptability. Most strikingly, former Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) weighed in against Roberts, accusing Heritage of “carry[ing] water for antisemites.”
Earlier this week, I suggested the GOP might be in the opening stages of a civil war over the status of Jews in American life. I’m now convinced that it is. And the stakes couldn’t be higher.
John Fea also has a collection of right-wing white evangelical denunciations of Carlson, Heritage, and Fuentes. These MAGA evangelical leaders, like most of the conservatives quoted by Sommer and Beauchamp, are furious about Fuentes’ antisemitism and Carlson’s glib acceptance of it as part of the range of acceptable opinions within the MAGA coalition. The fault lines there have to do with white evangelicals’ support for the state of Israel and their “Bible-prophecy”-driven philosemitism (a stance that differs from Fuentes’ antisemitic conspiracy theories, but only during the current “dispensation”).
Some of these conservative critics of Carlson and Fuentes seem more upset that the interview aired their dirty laundry than they are about the fact of that dirty laundry, but — to their credit — many of them seem genuinely angry at the substance of Fuentes views and the suggestion from Carlson and Heritage that such views can or should be legitimized by allowing them to be openly debated.
Why were all these angry conservatives mum back in November 2022 when, just after announcing his campaign for re-election in 2024, “Donald Trump dined with white nationalist, Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes” at Mar-a-Lago? That’s a fair question.
It’s also a more than fair question to ask why all of these conservatives apparently so furious with Carlson and Heritage and Fuentes have not previously expressed any anger or qualifications with Trump’s “Mass Deportation Now” campaign or his “eating the cats” attacks on legal immigrants or his ten-fold expansion of ICE and Kavanaugh Stops targeting nonwhite Americans, immigrant and citizen alike. It’s absolutely a more than fair question to ask why Tucker Carlson is now being condemned for taking exactly the same slightly more polite and tactful endorsement of Great Replacement Theory in his friendly debate with Fuentes that the late Charlie Kirk took in his years-long debate and turf-war with Fuentes and his “Groyper Army.”
It sure seems like the real divide here is not between Nazi-apologists and “mainstream Republicans,” but between two factions of white supremacists. On the one side are white supremacists like Dreher, Erickson, McConnell, Lance Wallnau, and Denny Burk who want to include (some) Jews as white people while on the other side are white supremacists like Fuentes who explicitly argue that Jews do not count as white.
That’s the impression one gets from seeing “white nationalist, Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes” denounced for being a Holocaust denier but not for being a white nationalist.
It’s also hard to witness all of this without sharing the frustration expressed here by Gary Legum at Wonkette:
The modern Right in America has been playing footsie with Nazis for years. Decades, even. You know it. We know it. Journalists and political scientists and historians and everyone else to the left of, say, Lindsay Graham has been screaming about it and documenting it for so long that we can’t remember a time when they weren’t. There probably has never been a time when they weren’t.
So imagine our huge fucking surprise to see, just this week, certain conservatives realize that Holy shit, our movement is playing footsie with Nazis! Yeah, congrats on waking up from your coma, Rip Van Winkle. We all have indoor toilets now, too.
Legum has been acquainted with Fuentes and his Groypers and the Neo-Nazi followers of other MAGA-embraced far-right podcasters for years because they’ve been in his mentions and his inbox, trolling, harassing, and sprinkling in the occasional violent threat. And whenever left-of-center bloggers or journalists mentioned this, we’d be lectured on “civility” by centrists and conservatives chiding us for supposedly “going around calling everyone who disagrees with you a Nazi.” That’s not what we were doing. We were calling the Nazis who called themselves Nazis “Nazis.”
I suppose it’s good that some of those conservative folks are now starting to realize we weren’t exaggerating. (Just as it was, on one level, good that folks like David French and Russell Moore came to realize we weren’t exaggerating — even if it was not at all good that they had to go through learning this first-hand.)
But here I will try to do something that is hard to do, and let that go. I will try not to respond, primarily, with an exasperated “What took you so long?” and instead try to respond, gently and positively, by asking “OK, so now that you understand what’s at stake, what are you going to do about it?”
Consider this, from Beauchamp’s piece: “In his post on the Carlson-Fuentes meetup, for example, Dreher cited a rough estimate from ‘a big player in conservative politics’ that ’30 to 40 percent of the Republican staff in Washington under the age of 30 are Groypers.'”
Rod Dreher’s assertions based on anonymous sources are not trustworthy, but let’s make a generous assumption of good faith here and accept that he believes this to be true — that “30 to 40 percent of the Republican staff in Washington under the age of 30 are Groypers.” That a third of the young Republican staffers on Capitol Hill, in the White House, in the Supreme Court, on K Street — are white supremacist, Holocaust deniers. Are Nazis.
The call is coming from inside his house. What is he going to do about it?
Dreher and all the other conservatives properly angry about the mainstreaming of Fuentes’ antisemitism seem to want to clean house, but they don’t seem prepared to understand that you can’t get rid of the antisemitism unless you’re also willing to get rid of the white supremacy. And if the Republican Party in 2025 were to turn its back on white supremacy, what would they have left?
These conservatives have, for decades, sneered at terms like “intersectionality,” so I’ll try to avoid such language here and remind them that these things are linked because, as the man said, “That train is never late.”
Like Beauchamp, I am heartened by the backlash to Carlson/Heritage/Fuentes that we’re seeing from some parts of the Republican Party, but I agree with him that they do not seem prepared to handle what it is they’re taking on because they do not yet seem to understand all it is that they’re taking on:
I wish them well in this quest: Truly, I do. Fuentes is every bit as awful as Dreher says; it is paramount for the safety of my community (American Jews) that people like him succeed in booting Fuentes from the coalition.
But I also wish they would engage in a little self-reflection. Because without it, their quest might be doomed to fail.
The dominant strain of right-wing punditry has been preoccupied with the overwhelming dangers of “cancel culture” and “wokeness” — Dreher published an entire book labeling it “soft totalitarianism.” In doing so, they defended and apologized for bigotry coming from people like Trump and Carlson when they railed against the evils of mass migration, Islam, and urban crime.
In doing so, they elevated anti-anti-bigotry into a kind of defining ideological principle: that accusations of bigotry, and not bigotry itself, is the real problem. The popularity of this attitude makes it exceptionally difficult for the right to police its own; any attempt at saying “this far, and no farther” is met with accusations of wokeness and cancellation.
You can’t simultaneously combat Fuentes’ Nazi influence and support a “war on DEI” and the erection of monuments to Confederate generals and klansmen. You can’t share most of his agenda while resisting one part of it. So Dreher et. al. will have to make a choice and I am not yet convinced that, once they understand that, they will not continue to make the same choice they have been making up until now — the same choice that Tucker Carlson and the Heritage Foundation have made.
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