Tucker Carlson’s decision last week to interview 27-year-old white nationalist Nick Fuentes for over two hours last week sent shockwaves through conservative media circles, with everyone from the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro to Bari Weiss’ the Free Press to the editorial board of Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal eviscerating the former Fox News host for platforming a far-right figure who’s made his hatred of Jews a facet of his appeal.
But the decision last week by Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts to absolve Carlson of any wrongdoing, saying that trying to cancel Fuentes was “not the answer” to addressing antisemitism, turned those shockwaves into a schism, with right-wing figures blasting the conservative think tank for trying to equivocate when it comes to far-right host who has praised Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and called the Holocaust “exaggerated.”
“The issue here isn’t that Tucker Carlson had Nick Fuentes on his show last week. He has every right to do that, of course,” Shapiro said on Monday’s episode of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” a portion of which he shared on X. “The issue here is that Tucker Carlson decided to normalize and fluff Nick Fuentes and that the Heritage Foundation then decided to robustly defend that performance.”
“Must-watch,” Weiss wrote in an X post quoting Shapiro’s video.
In response to a request for comment, Carlson texted: “That’s ‘right wing media’? Hilarious.”
“Mr. Fuentes has free speech and uses it to fantasize about killing and deporting Jews,” the Journal’s editorial board wrote on Sunday. “Is it now ‘cancel culture’ to criticize Mr. Carlson for treating Mr. Fuentes like a political truth-teller and feeding him softball questions? This is a parody of what ‘cancel culture’ meant when the campus left shouted down conservative judges and scholars.”
Weiss’ Free Press has also blanketed its home page with criticism of Carlson’s interview, with four of its six top stories on Monday morning tackling different facets of Carlson’s approach. “Carlson is Wrong About Christian Zionism,” read one headline on a story by Samuel Goldman. “The Moral Rot Eating the American Right,” read another headline on a piece by Erick Erickson.
One prominent voice voice on the right, Megyn Kelly, has so far been mum on the Fuentes interview fallout. She has defended Carlson in the past, saying on a podcast last month that while she didn’t believe Carlson was an antisemite, and that it was not her job to police his actions. “I don’t really care,” she said. “I think Tucker’s a very important, valuable voice in the national conversation.”
The criticism of Carlson has extended beyond media figures and onto the political stage. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who sparred with Carlson earlier this year over the U.S. relationship with Israel and its bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities, said at the Republican Jewish Coalition Annual Summit on Friday that Carlson was a “coward” for agreeing to host Fuentes.
“Now is a time for choosing,” Cruz said. “If you sit there with someone who says Adolf Hitler was very cool and that their mission is to defeat ‘global Jewry,’ and you say nothing, then you are a coward, and you are complicit in that evil.”
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) echoed that statement, quoting Roberts’ defense of Carlson on X to say the “‘intellectual backbone of the conservative movement’ is only as strong as the values it defends.”
“Last I checked, ‘conservatives should feel no obligation’ to carry water for antisemites and apologists for America-hating autocrats,” McConnell’s post read. “But maybe I just don’t know what time it is…”
Roberts tried to clean up his remarks, posting on X the various things he “abhorred” about Fuentes’ views as some staffers were shuffled around at the Heritage Foundation after the remarks (“The Meltdown at Heritage—and the Fight for MAGA’s Future,” read the headline on the Free Press’ Eli Lake’s Sunday story).
Still, he wrote on Friday, he urged conservatives to “challenge,” not “cancel,” those with whom they disagreed.
“Our task is to confront and challenge those poisonous ideas at every turn to prevent them from taking America to a very dark place,” Roberts wrote on X. “Join us—not to cancel—but to guide, challenge, and strengthen the conversation, and be confident as I am that our best ideas at the heart of western civilization will prevail.”
But Carlson’s failure to seriously challenge Fuentes doesn’t seem to have hurt his popularity. His podcast still ranked at No. 2 on Spotify’s podcast charts on Monday, and the YouTube post of the interview has 5.1 million views. His X post with the two-hour conversation? 17.3 million.
