Conservatives are fighting among themselves over the far-right commentator Tucker Carlson’s decision to interview the antisemitic white supremacist Nick Fuentes on his podcast, where the two men decried conservatives who support Israel.
Kevin Roberts, the head of the conservative Heritage Foundation thinktank, defended Carlson after the episode, saying Carlson “remains and, as I have said before, always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation”.
The response from the prominent thinktank on the right – the group behind Project 2025, the conservative manifesto that has guided the Trump administration – has roiled some of its supporters and deepened a chasm on the right over support of Israel and antisemitism.
On the podcast, Carlson called out Republicans including Senator Ted Cruz, the former president George W Bush and the ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, for being “Christian Zionists” who have been “seized by this brain virus”.
“I dislike them more than anybody,” said Carlson, the former Fox host whose podcast has skewed further to the right during the second Trump term.
Fuentes – who used to be ostracized by the mainstream right for his views, including support of Hitler and claims that Jews run the country – said on the podcast that “organized Jewry” held outsize influence and said he was a fan of Joseph Stalin.
Nick Fuentes speaks at a pro-Trump march on 14 November 2020 in Washington DC. Photograph: Jacquelyn Martin/AP
In remarks to the Republican Jewish Coalition after the podcast aired on Thursday, Cruz said: “Now is a time for choosing. Now is a time for courage … 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.”
Cruz also said he had seen more antisemitism on the right in the last six months than he had seen in his entire life, claiming it was a “poison” and that the party and the country were “facing an existential crisis”.
In recent weeks, reporting revealed that a group chat of young Republicans included a host of antisemitic comments, and texts revealed a Trump nominee – since withdrawn – who said he had a “Nazi streak”.
Fuentes went further on his views in a video after the podcast. “Do us all a favor,” he said. “We are done with the Jewish oligarchy. We are done with the slavish surrender to Israel, the wars, the foreign aid, the policing of antisemitism, the Holocaust religion and propaganda.”
In his video response to the podcast and to speculation that the Heritage Foundation would distance itself from Carlson, Roberts said that Christians can critique Israel without being antisemitic, and that conservatives didn’t need to “reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class or from their mouthpieces in Washington”. He decried any attempts to cancel or silence Carlson and Fuentes, calling those speaking out against Carlson a “venomous coalition”.
“The American people expect us to be focusing on our political adversaries on the left, not attacking our friends on the right,” Roberts said. “I disagree with, even abhor, things that Nick Fuentes says, but canceling him is not the answer either. When we disagree with a person’s thoughts and opinions, we challenge those ideas in debate.”
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Fuentes thanked Roberts for the video in a reply on X, citing his “courage in standing up for open discourse and defending Tucker against the Israel First Woke Right”.
The Heritage Foundation did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Republican Jewish Coalition’s CEO, Matt Brooks, told Jewish Insider that Roberts and the Heritage Foundation’s decision to stand with Carlson left him “appalled, offended and disgusted”.
Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader in the US Senate, called for people aligned with the Heritage Foundation to “disavow this dangerous mainstreaming of these hateful ideologies”.
Conservative media have called out Carlson for giving Fuentes a broader audience and not challenging his views in the interview. The Washington Free Beacon summed up Roberts’s take in its headline: “Heritage Foundation President: ‘Don’t Cancel Nick Fuentes,’ as Stalin Fan Fuentes Tells Jews to ‘Get The F— Out of America’.”
The National Review’s Jim Geraghty wrote: “Really, Kevin Roberts? You think this twerp is somebody that serious thinkers of the modern right should spend a lot of time engaging with? You don’t see any issue with putting the spotlight on this guy and giving him more than two hours to spew his bullcrap with no pushback?”
