Tucker Carlson hosts politician with white-supremacist ties to discuss China

Written by Nikki McCann Ramirez

Published

On February 24, Tucker Carlson hosted former Commerce Undersecretary Corey Stewart, who has well-documented ties to prominent white supremacists. The interview focused on alleged ties between American telecommunications company AT&T and China Telecom. (AT&T has issued a statement claiming “the story that aired was misleading and failed to represent all the facts.”)

Stewart is a longtime conservative firebrand who rose to prominence spearheading crackdowns against undocumented immigrants in Prince William County, Virginia, and ran a failed 2018 campaign to unseat Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine. During the campaign, it was revealed that Stewart had ties to prominent white nationalists, including Jason Kessler and Paul Nehlen.

In January of 2017, Stewart met with Nehlen, a white nationalist and anti-Semite, calling him a “personal hero.” Nehlen once appeared on a white nationalist podcast to declare that he supported the murder of Jews. While discussing the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburg, Nehlen stated that he wasn’t "opposed to someone … leading a million Robert Bowers to the promised land,” referring to the perpetrator of the shooting. Nehlen has also lamented that one synagogue shooting hadn’t been livestreamed.

Stewart also has close ties to American neo-Nazi Jason Kessler. Kessler was the organizer of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virgina, which resulted in the murder of Heather Heyer by another neo-Nazi. In 2017, Stewart appeared at an event hosted by Kessler’s organization Unity & Security for America. The event was held in support of removal of a Black member from the Charlottesville City Council, after the member had called for the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from a public park. Kessler endorsed Stewart in his 2017 run for governor, and following Unite the Right, Stewart called fellow Republicans “weak” for apologizing over the events of the rally organized by Kessler. 

Stewart has also repeatedly voiced his support for and glorified the Confederacy. Jane Coaston reported for Vox:

In 2017, he attended the “Old South Ball” in Danville, Virginia, and gave a speech saying Virginia was the state of “Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson,” adding that the Confederate flag “is our heritage, it’s what makes us Virginia, and if you take that away, we lose our identity.”

…

At another campaign event in 2017 hosted by an avowed secessionist who attended the disastrous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Stewart again defended the Confederacy, saying, “Virginians, we think for ourselves... And if the established order is wrong, we rebel. We did that in the Revolution, we did it in the Civil War, and we’re doing it today. We’re doing it today because they’re trying to rob us of everything that we hold dear: our history, our heritage, our culture.”

He’s said (and tweeted) that the removal of Confederate statues was an action akin to what the terror group ISIS would do and that he would “defund” any Virginia city that took down any Confederate memorial.

After the 2020 election, Stewart was appointed by Trump to “a newly created senior post” in the Department of Commerce in order to “help push through hardline policies on China before the end of the administration.”

Here's Stewart and Carlson:

From the February 24, 2021 edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

Carlson has his own long-documented connection to white nationalism, minimizing it as a threat and maintaining a consistent drumbeat of nativist and xenophobic content.