Tucker Carlson’s friendly sitdown with Nick Fuentes is drawing harsh criticism from elements of the right, but it seems utterly inevitable given the former Fox host’s trajectory over the last decade.
Fuentes, a white nationalist streamer and Holocaust denier who just weeks ago called for the expulsion of American Jews and Muslims, was once verboten in GOP circles. But in recent months he has become increasingly prominent, drawing millions of views in a series of interviews on right-wing podcasts.
On Monday, he scored his biggest platform yet with an appearance on Carlson’s show, which has one of the largest audiences among news podcasts. Over the course of their two-plus-hour conversation, Carlson let Fuentes retell his origin story in a manner that soft-peddled his bigotry; the pair found common ground over their shared disdain for Christian Zionists and right-wing Jews, and their contempt for liberal women and support for patriarchy; they buried the hatchet over each previously believing that the other was “a fed”; and they agreed to disagree over Fuentes’ tendency to attack Carlson’s allies.
In short, it was a massive win for Fuentes — and one that everyone should have seen coming. Carlson, who is a close ally of President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance, has spent years drawing similarly extreme and noxious individuals into the Republican tent and bringing their views closer to the mainstream.
Carlson is the epitome of the GOP’s country-club class: His father was a political appointee in the Reagan and Bush administrations, his stepmother an heiress to the Swanson foods fortune, and he spent decades as a magazine journalist and a host and commentator on PBS, CNN, MSNBC, and finally Fox News. But in late 2016, he began drawing a following among the most bigoted corners of the online right, drawing praise from the likes of former Klansman David Duke.
White supremacists realized early in Carlson’s rise — and were happy to say publicly — that Carlson was, in the words of the neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin, “literally our greatest ally,” someone willing and capable of taking their talking points from far-right internet fever swamps to Fox’s huge national audience.
Over the next several years, Carlson helped turn far-right conspiracy theories like the great replacement into right-wing dogma while running cover for white nationalist explosions like the 2017 march in Charlottesville, Virginia. And after leaving Fox and striking out on his own he became even more openly radical, promoting Hitler apologia and explicit antisemitism.
And Carlson hasn’t just brought extreme ideas into the GOP — he’s often sought to sanitize the once-fringe elements of the right. In effect, he has turned himself into a single degree of separation between the White House and people like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and false flag aficionado Alex Jones — and now, Fuentes.
The unfortunate reality is that the party that turns Carlson into a kingmaker can’t possibly maintain a cordon against even the most extreme and bigoted figures. And that means the future of the GOP — and, perhaps, the future for American Jews — is grim.