On Thursday evening, the leader of the Heritage Foundation — the foremost think tank of the MAGA right — embraced an overt Nazi into his political alliance.
You might assume I’m being hyperbolic. I assure you that isn’t the case. The Nazi in question, the podcaster Nick Fuentes, has characterized Adolf Hitler as “really frickin cool” and stated that “perfidious Jews” should “be subjected to the death penalty” after “we seize control.”
And on Thursday, Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, posted a video defending this individual’s presence in civil-right politics: portraying Fuentes not as a purveyor of hate deserving expulsion from the respectable right, but as a cohort member whose perspective of Jews as malevolent traitors merits civil discourse.
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“The populace anticipates our focus to be on our political rivals on the left, not targeting our allies on the right,” Roberts declared. “I disagree with, and even detest, sentiments expressed by Nick Fuentes. But ostracizing him is not the answer.”
This signifies a pivotal juncture for American conservatism. Previously, the movement felt compelled to conceal prejudices — notably antisemitism — behind a flimsy facade of plausible deniability. Yet, with Fuentes, there’s no ambiguity: He reiterates, incessantly, that Jews are wicked and the origin of America’s paramount issues. Should someone akin to him be deemed one of Roberts’s “friends on the right,” then the movement’s leadership is now acknowledging that overt antisemitism constitutes a valid political stance within the MAGA movement.
Currently, notable conservative personalities — such as authors Erick Erickson and Rod Dreher — are horrified, vociferously opposing Fuentes’ newfound legitimacy. Most remarkably, Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the former Senate Majority Leader, intervened against Roberts, accusing Heritage of “advocat[ing] for antisemites.”
Earlier in the week, I posited that the GOP might be in the preliminary phases of an internal conflict concerning the status of Jews in American society. I am now convinced that it is indeed happening. And the stakes could not be more critical.
Related
- The GOP’s antisemitism dilemma
How we arrived here: Tucker Carlson
To grasp the current situation, it’s essential to comprehend the individual who acted as the conduit between Fuentes and Roberts: Tucker Carlson.
Carlson and Fuentes, as recently as August, had openly detested one another (Carlson famously referred to Fuentes as a “weird little gay kid”). However, increasingly, they’ve evolved into two sides of the same coin. While Fuentes is forthrightly and violently antisemitic, Carlson has integrated comparable concepts more subtly — for example, by implying the Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus during Charlie Kirk’s memorial and promoting revisionist “histories” of World War II in which Winston Churchill, rather than Adolf Hitler, was portrayed as the actual villain.
Earlier this week, they reconciled: Carlson aired a flattering interview with Fuentes that largely served to present the extremist in a more palatable light than he projects on his own program. While there was no explicit endorsement of Hitler, Fuentes did (much to Carlson’s irritation) manage to commend another mass-murdering antisemite: Joseph Stalin.
The dialogue, in many respects, signified a type of capitulation on Carlson’s part: Despite having formerly attempted to dismiss Fuentes, he appears to have subsequently acknowledged his inability to accomplish this. Fuentes’ adherents, recognized as “groypers,” had become a significant proportion of the GOP’s younger members. In his commentary regarding the Carlson-Fuentes encounter, Dreher referenced an approximate figure from “a major figure in conservative politics” suggesting that “30 to 40 percent of the Republican staff in Washington under 30 are Groypers.”
These individuals constitute a pivotal audience that Carlson couldn’t afford to alienate; their presence clarifies why he and fellow podcaster Candace Owens have been progressively embracing antisemitism in recent broadcasts. The young conservatives who consume online programs and streamers appreciate this material and are more than willing to purchase it.
However, Carlson transcends merely being part of the online right’s ecosystem: He is unequivocally among the MAGA right’s most influential voices. He delivered a speech during prime time at the 2024 Republican National Convention and, by all accounts, assumed a central function in JD Vance’s elevation to the vice presidency. Upon providing Fuentes a platform, it legitimized the “weird little gay kid” beyond the internet’s feverish depths: authorizing prominent Trump-aligned individuals to openly engage with Fuentes and his groyper followers.
Carlson’s choice to pursue this encountered substantial opposition: Both National Review magazine and Sen. Ted Cruz criticized him vehemently.
“If you are in the presence of an individual who asserts that Adolf Hitler was incredibly cool, and that their objective is to combat and vanquish global Jewry, and you remain silent, then you are a coward and an accomplice to that evil,” Cruz stated.
Enter: The Heritage Foundation
This serves as the fundamentally crucial context for Roberts’ eventual intervention. His principal intention in the video wasn’t necessarily defending Fuentes; it was shielding Carlson from these subsequent attacks.
“We will consistently defend our allies against the defamation perpetrated by malicious actors serving ulterior agendas,” Roberts asserted. “This encompasses Tucker Carlson, who remains, and as I’ve previously stated, will invariably be a close confidant of the Heritage Foundation. The spiteful coalition assailing him is instigating discord. Their attempt to silence him will prove futile.”
Roberts’s video underscores the significance of Carlson’s amicable discussion with Fuentes — ”one of the most hazardous videos ever in MAGA media,” as The Bulwark’s seasoned observer of the right, Will Sommer, characterizes it.
When Carlson opted to endorse Fuentes, he also jeopardized his own standing. The inevitable personal assaults on Carlson from figures like Cruz motivated Carlson’s allies within the mainstream MAGA sphere, such as Roberts, to defend him.
And it was impossible to achieve this without, either implicitly or explicitly, suggesting that accommodating individuals like Fuentes within the broader right-wing framework is acceptable.
Consequently, Carlson’s choice to engage with Fuentes yielded a tangible and direct outcome: prompting the leading right-wing think tank to recognize a Hitler admirer as a legitimate interlocutor. Fuentes is now, in a very genuine sense, entering the mainstream.
Conservatives require a dose of cancel culture
The Fuentes-Carlson-Roberts axis is now alerting Trump-aligned conservatives to the deterioration within their movement. Individuals such as Dreher, a postliberal author who relocated to Hungary largely due to his admiration for Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian-right regime, are advocating for a purge. As Dreher articulates:
I simply fail to comprehend the rationale behind treating Fuentes as a conventional political entity — irrespective of his relatively substantial following. He is a profoundly immoral individual, devoid of any redeeming traits. If his mode of discourse and beliefs permeate the mainstream of conservatism, our fate is sealed, and we will deserve the consequences…
A demarcation must be established between us and individuals akin to Fuentes…because they are impervious to reason, disinclined to engage in rational discourse with anyone, and driven solely by the gratification derived from hatred and transgression. They will contaminate anything they come into contact with.
I extend my best wishes for their success in this endeavor: sincerely, I do. Fuentes is precisely as detestable as Dreher suggests; it is of paramount importance for the welfare of my community (American Jews) that individuals such as him succeed in expelling Fuentes from the alliance.
However, I also hope they will engage in some introspection. Absent this, their pursuit might be doomed to failure.
The dominant inclination within right-wing commentary has been fixated on the overwhelming perils of “cancel culture” and “wokeness” — Dreher authored an entire book categorizing it as “soft totalitarianism.” In doing so, they defended and rationalized bigotry originating from figures such as Trump and Carlson when they vehemently opposed the detriments of mass migration, Islam, and urban crime.
In doing so, they elevated resistance to anti-bigotry to the status of a defining ideological tenet: asserting that accusations of bigotry, rather than bigotry itself, constitute the actual issue. The prevalence of this mindset renders it exceedingly challenging for the right to self-regulate; any attempt to declare “thus far, but no further” is met with allegations of wokeness and cancellation.
“It’s not merely ‘no guardrails’ — it’s actively preventing the establishment of guardrails,” as Richard Hanania, an influential author on the right (and himself a former participant in white nationalist forums), conveyed to me in a recent exchange.
This exemplifies the “no enemies on the right” rationale that enabled Vance to disregard the pro-Hitler sentiments among New York Young Republicans — and was explicitly invoked by Kevin Roberts in his dual defense of Carlson and Fuentes.
For as long as this perspective prevails within the minds of the majority of Republicans — for as long as they maintain that the very notion of enforcing standards represents the ultimate act of political treachery — it will pose a substantial obstacle to any endeavor to excise Fuentes, let alone Carlson, from the coalition.
Individuals like Roberts will remain present to defend them, employing the rhetoric that Republicans have utilized to rationalize every abhorrent assertion that Trump and others within his sphere have been directing at minorities for years. And it will prove effective.
“I am concerned that the campus speech debates of the 2010s have eroded the judgment of numerous conservatives,” Giancarlo Sopo, a former Trump campaign advisor on Hispanic outreach, posted on X. “Regardless of the depravity of the sentiment, criticism is deemed taboo, and ostracism unthinkable, provided one gestures vaguely toward ‘the right.’”
Thus, the current discord within the right necessitates not only overt confrontation with Fuentes but also introspection regarding the actions undertaken by the more mainstream right that facilitated his ascension.
Update, October 31, 2:56 pm: This article was initially published at 1:50 pm and has been amended to incorporate a quotation from former Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Source: vox.com
