Image of Fuentes and Buchanan

Molly Butler / Media Matters

Research/Study Research/Study

“Pat Buchanan was right about everything”: As Heritage scrambles over Nick Fuentes, its endorsement of the nativist pundit for a presidential medal remains

Trump once called Buchanan a “Hitler lover” and “an anti-Semite," adding, “It's just incredible that anybody could embrace this guy”

Written by Jack Wheatley

Research contributions from Payton Armstrong

Published

Amid the fallout from Tucker Carlson’s interview with white nationalist Nick Fuentes, the Heritage Foundation has faced accusations of condoning antisemitic extremism and Heritage President Kevin Roberts has tried to distance himself from Fuentes after initially defending Carlson. Roberts and the prominent conservative think tank, however, have recently urged President Donald Trump to award the Medal of Freedom to Pat Buchanan — a longtime Republican operative and nativist pundit who has pushed antisemitic rhetoric and questioned the Holocaust — and released a video claiming “Buchanan was right about everything.”

Heritage's apparent endorsement of Buchanan is a departure from the criticism Buchanan previously faced from some right-wing figures — including Carlson, who called him “antisemitic” in 1999, and Trump, who described Buchanan as “a Hitler lover” that same year.

Jump to section...

  • Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts is facing backlash for supporting Tucker Carlson after friendly interview with Nick Fuentes

    • Heritage has been facing backlash for initially supporting Carlson after his softball interview with Fuentes, a white nationalist streamer and Holocaust denier. Following the October 27 interview, Roberts voiced support for Carlson and criticized the “venomous coalition” of “bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda” and who are a part of the “globalist class” now seeking to “cancel” him. [Twitter/X, 10/30/25; Media Matters, 3/31/25; The New York Times, 11/6/25, 9/9/25]
    • After a follow-up statement from Roberts attempting to clarify his position, the Heritage Foundation president reportedly faced internal backlash and several resignations from Heritage staffers. The fallout has added to a split within right-wing media over a number of issues during Trump's second term, including policies related to Israel, tariffs, Ukraine, and the handling of Jeffrey Epstein's case. [Media Matters, 11/11/25]
    • Defending himself and his organization from accusations of sympathizing with antisemitism, Roberts claimed he didn’t know who Fuentes was, saying: “I actually don’t have time to consume a lot of news. … I consume a lot of sports.” In a leaked staff meeting, Roberts stated: “I didn’t know much about this Fuentes guy,” adding: “I still don’t.” [The New York Times, 11/13/25]

  • Heritage recently called for Trump to give Pat Buchanan — who has pushed antisemitic rhetoric and questioned the Holocaust — the Presidential Medal of Freedom, claiming he “was right about everything”

    • Buchanan is a prominent far-right author, political commentator, former GOP speechwriter, and unsuccessful presidential candidate with a history of promoting racism, attacking women and LGBTQ people, and questioning the Holocaust. An influential longtime figure in conservative politics, Buchanan worked in the White House as part of the Nixon and Reagan administrations before running multiple failed campaigns for president — first as a Republican primary candidate in 1992 and 1996 and then as the Reform Party’s presidential nominee in 2000. He was fired from MSNBC in 2012 for his book Suicide of a Superpower, which critics labeled as racist, antisemitic, and homophobic. He has also appeared numerous times in white nationalist media spaces, including writing for VDare and appearing on The Political Cesspool Radio Show. Buchanan is credited as one of the fathers of paleoconservatism, a staunchly nationalist, anti-immigrant, and isolationist far-right ideology that has strongly influenced the “alt-right” and modern “America First” movements. [Media Matters, 7/29/11, 10/24/11, 9/2/09, 12/28/10, 8/19/08; Politico, 2/17/12; VDare, accessed 11/14/25; The Baffler, 11/4/18; Vox, 5/6/16, Jacobin, 7/2/24]
    • In August, Roberts signed onto a letter to Trump recommending Buchanan for the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The letter’s signatories — which also included the America First Policy Institute's Greg Sindelar, Center for Renewing America's Eric Teetsel, and Claremont Institute's William Thibeau — claimed, “His nationally syndicated column, bestselling books, and regular appearances on television and radio brought principled arguments for America-First foreign policy, economic nationalism, and traditional values into millions of homes.” They added, “Decades before these ideas became mainstream, he prophetically warned that unfettered globalization, open-border immigration, and endless military engagements were threats to our nation.” (Below their signatures on the letter, which is hosted on Heritage’s website, it states: “Names and affiliations listed for identification purposes only, not as institutional endorsements.”) [The Heritage Foundation, 8/29/25]
    • In September, Heritage released a video titled “Pat Buchanan Was Right About Everything - He Deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom,” which included Buchanan saying, “This war is for the soul of America. … We must take back our cities and take back our culture and take back our country.” In one clip from the video, Rep. Riley Moore (R-WV) announced that he had “sent a letter to President Trump urging him to award Pat Buchanan the Presidential Medal of Freedom,” adding, “Buchanan was right about pretty much everything 20 years before anyone even realized it.” In another clip, Roberts said that “Pat Buchanan is so deserving of a Presidential Medal of Freedom.” Heritage posted the video — which states that it was paid for by The Heritage Foundation — on YouTube and X (formerly Twitter), with the organization writing on X: “Pat Buchanan was right about America First before anyone else saw it. ... He deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom.” [YouTube, The Heritage Foundation, 9/10/25; Twitter/X, 9/10/25]

  • Buchanan has long trafficked in antisemitic tropes and questioned the Holocaust

    • In 1990, Buchanan referred to Capitol Hill as “Israeli-occupied territory.” In 1996, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency wrote of Buchanan: “His indiscriminate use of anti-Semitic code words to support his policy positions, his praise of Hitler as ‘an individual of great courage,’ and his defense of Nazi war criminals and flirtations with Holocaust denial theories alienated even those who had given him the benefit of the doubt.” [Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 2/28/96]
    • In his 2011 book, Suicide of a Superpower, Buchanan claimed that “American Jews appear to be an endangered species” as “a result of the collective decision of Jews themselves,” because “Jewish women have led the battle for abortion rights.” [Media Matters, 10/21/11]
    • In a 2010 column titled “Are Liberals Anti-WASP?” Buchanan complained: “If [Supreme Court Justice Elena] Kagan is confirmed, Jews, who represent less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, will have 33 percent of the Supreme Court seats.” He continued, “Is this the Democrats’ idea of diversity?” [Buchanan.org, 5/14/10]
    • A review by The American Prospect noted that Buchanan wrote that “Jewish-Americans clamored to have the United States smash Hitler’s regime,” and that after World War II “Jewish influence over foreign policy became almost an obsession with American leaders.” According to the review, Buchanan also “quotes [Charles] Lindbergh charging that ‘Jewish influence in Hollywood and the press was being used to agitate for war,’” and “quotes, in point, George Kennan that ‘Jews “pretty well dominated the formation of American opinion”’ on Russia, as well as John Foster Dulles that it was ‘almost impossible … to carry out a foreign policy not approved by the Jews’ and William Fulbright that ‘Israel controls the Senate.‘” [The American Prospect, 12/19/01]
    • In a 1977 column, Buchanan wrote that Hitler was “an individual of great courage.” He continued: “Hitler’s success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path.” [FAIR, 2/26/96]
    • In a 2005 column questioning “Was World War II worth it?” Buchanan wrote: “True, U.S. and British troops liberated France, Holland and Belgium from Nazi occupation. But before Britain declared war on Germany, France, Holland and Belgium did not need to be liberated. They were free. They were only invaded and occupied after Britain and France declared war on Germany – on behalf of Poland.” Buchanan went on to seemingly blame the Allied powers for the conflict, asking, “But why destroy Hitler? If to liberate Germans, it was not worth it. After all, the Germans voted Hitler in. If it was to keep Hitler out of Western Europe, why declare war on him and draw him into Western Europe?” [World Net Daily, 5/11/05]
    • In a 1990 column, Buchanan wrote that “reportedly, half of the 20,000 survivor testimonies in Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem are considered ‘unreliable’” because of “Holocaust Survivor Syndrome,” which he claimed involved “group fantasies of martyrdom and heroics.” Buchanan didn't say who “reported” this claim. [The Holocaust History Project, accessed 11/13/25; Media Matters, 6/8/09]
    • In the same 1990 column, Buchanan also questioned the numbers massacred at the Treblinka death camp during the Holocaust and seemingly defended John Demjanjuk, who was convicted of being a guard at a Nazi death camp. He wrote: “The Israeli court, however, concluded that the murder weapon for 850,000 was the diesel engine from a Soviet tank which drove its exhaust into the death chamber,” then added, “The problem is: Diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody. … Demjanjuk's weapon of mass murder cannot kill.” In reality, it is well-documented that the Nazis began using carbon monoxide from engine exhaust to murder people in specially built gas chambers by 1941. [The Holocaust History Project, accessed 11/13/25; NPR, 3/17/12; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, accessed 11/18/25]
    • In a 2009 column, Buchanan claimed “Hitler had never wanted war with Poland” and suggested “Hitler wanted to end the war in 1940.” He wrote: “Hitler wanted to end the war in 1940, almost two years before the trains began to roll to the camps. Hitler had never wanted war with Poland, but an alliance with Poland such as he had with Francisco Franco's Spain, Mussolini's Italy, Miklos Horthy's Hungary and Father Jozef Tiso's Slovakia. Indeed, why would he want war when, by 1939, he was surrounded by allied, friendly or neutral neighbors, save France.” [Media Matters, 7/29/11]

  • Right-wing figures including Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump previously called out Buchanan’s history of antisemitic commentary

    • National Review’s William F. Buckley Jr. wrote in his 1992 book, In Search of Antisemitism: “I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism.” Buckley speculated that “whatever it was that drove him to say and do it: most probably, an iconoclast temperament.” [WBUR, 6/23/25; William F. Buckley Jr., In Search of Anti-Semitism, 1991]
    • Appearing on CSPAN in 1999, Tucker Carlson said, “I do believe there is a pattern with Pat Buchanan of needling the Jews. Is that antisemitic? Yeah, after a while you conclude it is in some sense antisemitic.” Carlson criticized Buchanan at length for “relentless[ly] bringing up topics related to Judaism.” [CSPAN, 9/24/99]
    • George W. Bush criticized Buchanan’s views during the 2000 presidential campaign, saying, “Pat sees an America that should have stayed home while Hitler overran Europe and perpetrated the Holocaust.” [The New York Times, 10/26/99]
    • Fox News host Chris Wallace stated Buchanan “has said some very incendiary things about Israel, about Jews, about blacks, about other minorities.” Wallace also countered Buchanan’s claim that he was blacklisted from the outlet, adding that while “he’s entitled to say those things. It's a free country, but on the other hand, groups that are offended by those remarks are entitled to say it too.” He added: “An employer, be it Fox News or MSNBC or anybody else, is entitled to say you know what? We don't want this guy.” [Media Matters, 2/17/12]
    • Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer sharply criticized Buchanan in 1992 for his “fascist world view” and “fascistic” instincts, writing that he is “moved to debunk Treblinka” and “defend those who were part of the genocide machine.” Krauthammer wrote that Buchanan “wishes the Holocaust would go away. Which is why he finds himself, perhaps even despite himself, moved to debunk Treblinka, demean survivors (as given to 'group fantasies of martyrdom and heroics'), and defend those who were part of the genocide machine.” [Media Matters, 7/12/12]
    • While he was mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani called Buchanan's 1996 New Hampshire Republican primary victory “frightening” and said he had a “history of protecting Nazis.” Giuliani also said, “Somebody as negative as Pat Buchanan, and someone who plays on the worst instincts of people, like he does, is not a good thing for the Republican Party,” adding, “We’re going to try and do everything we can to stop Pat Buchanan.” [CNN, 2/22/96; New York Daily News, 2/22/96]
    • In 1999, Donald Trump remarked on NBC’s Meet The Press that Buchanan is “a Hitler lover. I guess he's an anti-Semite.” Trump went on: “He doesn't like the blacks. He doesn't like the gays. It's just incredible that anybody could embrace this guy.” [USA Today, 1/15/19]