Mother Jones illustration; Chip Somodevilla/Getty, Zach D Roberts/NurPhoto/Getty
Earlier this week, Tucker Carlson welcomed prominent white nationalist Nick Fuentes onto the former Fox News host’s video podcast.
As my colleague Kiera Butler described their conversation: Fuentes “made the case for the importance of Americans ‘to be pro-white,’ sang the praises of brutal Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, and bemoaned the problem of ‘organized Jewry in America.’”
Much of their friendly chat involved lambasting Republicans who support Christian Zionism—the belief among some evangelicals that Christians should support the state of Israel. Carlson said that Republican Christian Zionists like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee were “seized by this brain virus.”
“I dislike them more than anybody,” Carlson added.
Butler has written extensively about Christian Zionism, and how, at its core, the movement does not embrace adherence to Judaism:
Once the Messiah arrives, many Christian Zionists are convinced that Jews will convert en masse to Christianity; in many versions, those who don’t convert will perish.
But this was not the reason Carlson and Fuentes disavowed Christian Zionism. Rather, Fuentes has routinely espoused antisemitic views, even expressing disbelief in the Holocaust.
“Six million cookies? I’m not buying it,” he said in 2019, for example, comparing baked goods to the six million Jews killed by Nazis. In 2022, Fuentes said that all he wanted was “revenge against my enemies and a total Aryan victory.”
But perhaps just as striking as Fuentes’ beliefs, or that Carlson gave him a massive platform from which to share them, was that Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts posted his own video later in the week on X, unapologetically supporting Carlson’s decision to have Fuentes on the show in the first place.
As conservatives split over Fuentes’ appearance, Roberts described the critics as a “venomous coalition” whose “attempt to cancel [Carlson] will fail.”
“Conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class or from their mouthpieces in Washington,” said Roberts, whose organization published Project 2025, a blueprint of sorts for Trump’s second term in the White House. (To this, former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell replied: “Last I checked, ‘conservatives should feel no obligation’ to carry water for antisemites and apologists for America-hating autocrats.”)
Carlson “always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation,” Roberts concluded his full-throated defense.
Roberts’ response only deepened the right’s rift over the Fuentes-Carlson interview. “Siding with Hitler and Stalin over Churchill is not conservative or consistent, no matter what Tucker claims,” conservative author Bethany Mandel wrote on X. “In deciding to side with him, Kevin Roberts has shifted the foundations on which the Heritage Foundation was built.”
The onslaught of negative feedback prompted Roberts to clarify his views about Fuentes with an X post Friday afternoon: “[T]he Heritage Foundation and I denounce and stand against his vicious antisemitic ideology, his Holocaust denial, and his relentless conspiracy theories that echo the darkest chapters of history,” Roberts said, before making a point to say antisemitism has “blossomed on the Left,” too.
But it’s not so easy to put the genie back in the bottle. As of Saturday morning, Roberts’ video supporting the objectionable Carlson-Fuentes interview has far more views (15.9 million) than the original interview itself (4.7 million).
