The Right's Race Reckoning

A civil war has broken out in MAGA.

Earlier this week, Tucker Carlson hosted Holocaust-denying white nationalist Nick Fuentes on his massively influential podcast for a friendly, two hour-long interview. “Thank you for doing this, I’ve wanted to meet you,” Carlson kicked off his show with a smile as the pair sat at a table inside his rustic, timber-paneled cabin.

Fuentes, who has been banned from most platforms for his antisemitic rhetoric, delivered exactly the kind of bile that made him infamous: he blamed “organized Jewry” for America’s “big challenges,” called himself a “fan” of Joseph Stalin, and dismissed “Christian Zionists” as dupes. Tucker sat by and nodded along, offering only restrained questions and at times agreeing as the 27-year-old launched into familiar conspiracies about Jews and power.

Almost immediately, the interview set off a firestorm on the right. Dinesh D’Souza, the right-wing conspiracy theorist, posted screenshots of old messages he’d received from the late Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, criticizing him for once engaging Fuentes in a debate. “That was a massive mistake,” Kirk wrote at the time. “He’s vermin and you just gave him one of the biggest boosts of his career… You have no idea the damage you did.”

Fuentes himself is a product of that same right-wing media universe. He told Carlson he was “radicalized on race” by listening to mainstream conservative talk-radio host Mark Levin, and that he later devoured Dennis Prager’s PragerU videos—even joining the “PragerFORCE,” a campus outreach program aimed at mobilizing young conservatives against the “woke mob.” In other words, before Fuentes became a notorious extremist, he was nurtured by the very ecosystem that Carlson and others helped build.

Interviewing radical figures is nothing new for Carlson, who has spent the last few decades reinventing himself from bow-tied right-of-center MSNBC and CNN host to Fox News conspiracy theorist and MAGA movement radical. His sympathy for authoritarians and fringe narratives has helped pull figures like Alex Jones and Marjorie Taylor Greene from the outer edges into the Republican mainstream. Carlson thrives on outrage but his reach and his ability to shape right-wing discourse remains immense, with more than 20 million combined followers on his YouTube and X accounts alone.

Of course, Carlson knows how to skewer a guest when he wants to. Earlier this year, he humiliated Sen. Ted Cruz on his show, exposing Cruz’s naïveté about Iran, sending clips viral and drawing widespread mockery. In the same way, Carlson could have seized the moment to lay bare Fuentes’ unvarnished bigotry toward Jews and others. Instead, he looked the other way, basking him in soft, flattering light.

That failure did not go unnoticed. The softball interview enraged some conservatives, prompting sharp condemnations from across the right. The National Review editorial staff unloaded on Carlson, saying the Fuentes episode “makes it impossible to ignore the right’s festering antisemitism problem” and pointing out that Carlson’s deferential tone was anything but his usual style. “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?” they asked.

But just as traditional conservatives were trying to draw a moral line, another major institution of the movement chose the opposite path. The Heritage Foundation publicly rallied to Carlson’s defense, releasing a video of its president, Kevin Roberts, denouncing what he called a “venomous coalition” of conservatives “sowing division” by criticizing the interview. “The Heritage Foundation didn’t become the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement by canceling our own people or policing the consciences of Christians—and we won’t start doing that now,” Roberts declared.

His defense came after some observers noticed that mentions of Carlson had quietly vanished from Heritage’s website—a move Roberts cast as coincidental. But the video made clear where the organization stands: with Carlson, not those denouncing the mainstreaming of Fuentes’ brand of antisemitism.

That stance drew immediate rebukes from elected Republicans who see the dangerous bigotry as a bridge too far. Speaking at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s summit in Las Vegas, Sen. Cruz was unequivocal: “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 that their mission is to defeat ‘global Jewry,’ and you say nothing, then you are a coward, and you are complicit in that evil.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell echoed the sentiment in a post on X. “The ‘intellectual backbone of the conservative movement’ is only as strong as the values it defends,” he wrote. “Last I checked, conservatives should feel no obligation to carry water for antisemites and apologists for America-hating autocrats. But maybe I just don’t know what time it is…”

And Sen. Lindsey Graham called the episode “a wake-up call” for the GOP. “How many times does he have to play footsie with this antisemitic view of the Jewish people and Israel until you figure out that’s what he believes?” he said in an interview with Jewish Insider.

But the clash over Carlson and Fuentes is merely the latest sign of an ideological implosion on the right—a high stakes battle between the old conservative guard and the radicalized movement it helped birth. Years of tolerance and even embrace of conspiracy theories, election lies, and bigotry have reshaped the MAGA base and its media ecosystem, giving credence to radical voices that have pushed the party further from its traditional conservatism and deeper into grievance and hate.

Now, even as traditional conservatives attempt to reclaim their moral compass, they’re discovering that the forces they unleashed have grown too powerful to contain. If Fuentes was “radicalized on race” by Levin, where will the next generation raised on a media diet of venom from Carlson and Fuentes end up?