Tucker Carlson Interview Ignites Debate Over Antisemitism Among Conservatives

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Hey there. It's the NPR Politics Podcast.
I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting.

Speaker 3 I'm Sarah McCammon. I cover politics.

Speaker 6 And I'm Domenico Montanero, senior political editor and correspondent.

Speaker 5 And today on the show, how a Tucker Carlson podcast episode is forcing the entire conservative movement to confront some difficult questions about who belongs in the tent.

Speaker 5 Sarah, this episode, which I should note has roughly 6 million views already on YouTube, is between Carlson and this far-right influencer named Nick Fuentes. Let's just start there.
Who is Fuentes?

Speaker 3 Yeah, well, anybody who's been sort of paying attention to right-wing media has likely heard his name before. He's been around for a while.

Speaker 3 He's only 27, but he first got on a lot of people's radar back in 2017 after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which he attended.

Speaker 3 You know, he's known for holding a host of extreme views, racist and anti-Semitic views, including Holocaust denial. He's used violent and degrading rhetoric about women.

Speaker 3 And, And, you know, he has built an online following of largely young men who call themselves gripers.

Speaker 5 Got it. So how much of those kind of controversial views that you just talked about came up in this interview with Carlson?

Speaker 3 Well, you know, I should say that the two of them talked for more than two hours. A lot of people have remarked in what a kind of friendly tone this conversation took on.

Speaker 3 Carlson started by telling Fuentes, you know, look, I've heard about you. I wanted to meet you.
I wanted to hear what you really think.

Speaker 3 And critics on the right and the left have pointed out that he didn't challenge Fuentes very much. He largely stayed away from some of his most extreme and controversial past statements.

Speaker 3 They did talk about some of his views of Israel and of Jewish people.

Speaker 3 And, you know, Fuentes sort of invoked this long-standing anti-Semitic trope, this idea that Jewish loyalty to each other and to the state of Israel was somehow standing in the way of national unity.

Speaker 7 I would say, though, that

Speaker 7 the main challenge to that, a big challenge to that, is organized Jewry in America.

Speaker 3 And then he listed off a handful of influential Jewish Americans who he suggested were not capable of fostering that kind of unity he said was so important.

Speaker 7 I see Jewishness as the common denominator. And you're right.
It's not all Jewish people feel the same way. No one would say that, but that does seem to be the common denominator.

Speaker 7 And I just feel like it needs to be called out explicitly.

Speaker 3 So, Miles, that led to some blowback almost immediately.

Speaker 3 People like Texas Senator Ted Cruz and others have called out this rhetoric and said there's no place for anti-Semitism in the conservative movement or the Republican Party.

Speaker 3 This aired October 27th, just a couple of days before the Republican Jewish Coalition met in Las Vegas. And, you know, pushing back against anti-Semitism was a big theme there.

Speaker 5 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And I feel like the blowback is where the story does get really interesting. We start seeing...

Speaker 5 a lot of different Republicans and conservative people kind of engaging with how they want to think about some of these ideas. How has this played out at the Heritage Foundation?

Speaker 5 Because I know you've reported a lot on that as well.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so at the same time that prominent Republicans like Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham, Senator from South Carolina, were making these statements, sort of pushing back,

Speaker 3 Kevin Roberts, who leads the Heritage Foundation, made a statement essentially defending Tucker Carlson and pushing back against what he sort of characterized as a manifestation of cancel culture.

Speaker 3 Kevin Roberts leads the Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation is this long-standing, influential, sort of conservative institution in Washington, as you know.

Speaker 3 They were probably best known in recent years for being involved in Project 2025, that huge document that outlined a host of conservative objectives and policy goals, many of which have been implemented under the second Trump administration.

Speaker 3 So again, Kevin Roberts defended Carlson and pushed back against the pushback, in essence.

Speaker 3 And that led to a contentious staff meeting at Heritage last week in which Robert Rector, who's a longtime research fellow there, said that the conservative movement should learn from the mistakes of the past and learn from times in the past when they've pushed out some of the most extreme voices.

Speaker 8 You say, oh, we don't cancel. We do cancel.
Did we cancel David Duke?

Speaker 5 Yes.

Speaker 8 You don't even know who David Duke was, probably most of you. I have to say.
You know?

Speaker 8 Yes. Did we cancel the John Burt Society? Yes.

Speaker 5 Okay.

Speaker 8 Because they were harmful. Because if they're in your movement, you look like clowns.

Speaker 3 Okay. He and others stood up during this staff meeting, essentially asked Roberts, you know, where's the boundary here? Where is the line for the conservative movement?

Speaker 3 And here's how Roberts responded.

Speaker 5 That

Speaker 5 evil person, Quintes, although I still have hope for his soul, has an audience of several million people.

Speaker 8 And at least some of that audience might be open to be converted.

Speaker 6 You know, the Heritage Foundation, as Sarah mentioned, is a group that was instrumental in the creation of Project 2025.

Speaker 6 There are a lot of people who have flowed into this second Trump term, really kind of been the core engine of what this second Trump term is about and what it's doing.

Speaker 6 And the Heritage Foundation has gone through a long roiling of what its identity is. You know, it's a conservative think tank.

Speaker 6 It had been long respected on the right, but turned into something very different when former South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint took over the group in 2012.

Speaker 6 He was more ideological than research-driven. There was a struggle for the soul of the Heritage Foundation, really during his four years there.

Speaker 6 And that's really the inception of this since the Tea Party movement, you know, kind of moved the Republican Party into something more ideological than it had been before.

Speaker 6 It's really struggled to figure out what it is.

Speaker 5 I mean, Dominica, are you surprised at all that this podcast has generated such division among conservatives?

Speaker 6 Well, everyone has a line.

Speaker 6 You know, it's interesting because in a lot of ways, this is emblematic of the entire Trump era here, you know, that we've seen over the last 10 years, where the guardrails on what's appropriate to say in polite society have really been moved.

Speaker 6 I mean, you know, Trump ran on ending, quote, political correctness. Conservatives ran with that and later went after people for being, quote, woke in the last, you know, few years.

Speaker 6 But there's a reason things become politically correct. It's because they're the correct thing to say or what's acceptable in society.

Speaker 6 That's not only changed substantially, we haven't re-established guardrails for what is appropriate and what's not. Where are those lines?

Speaker 6 You know, clearly, here for the right, it's anti-Semitism, but there's a lot of it on the right as part of their coalition, whether they want to recognize it or not.

Speaker 6 You know, I mean, on the left, as the war in Gaza has dragged on, you've seen it some on the left as well.

Speaker 6 So neither party is really immune to this, but we're really still in this era of volatility of speech, of trying to figure out what is okay to say and what's not.

Speaker 6 And for a long time, these kinds of things would never have been able to see the light of day in any kind of mainstream place.

Speaker 3 And I think one thing that's really notable here, because, you know, know, Domenico is right, everybody has a line.

Speaker 3 And these concerns around anti-Semitism, I mean, first of all, we're seeing a larger pattern where there is, you know, a concerning pattern of increasing anti-Semitic incidents, violence, rhetoric across the political spectrum.

Speaker 3 Everyone I talked to for the story pretty much agreed on that.

Speaker 3 And, you know, there are a number of influential figures on the right, people like Nick Fuentes, or think of the conservative influencer and podcaster, Candace Owens, who's also built a huge following online, who have become particularly poignant in their anti-Semitic rhetoric.

Speaker 3 I think what happened here is this wasn't just internet influencers talking. This was the Heritage Foundation, which again is an institution in D.C.

Speaker 3 And for the head of the Heritage Foundation to step in and defend

Speaker 3 what a lot of people call the platforming of these ideas was sort of a breaking point for

Speaker 3 some people on the right in general and even at Heritage. There have been a handful of resignations.

Speaker 3 And in the wake of all of this, a task force that Heritage had established to fight anti-Semitism lost several members first, and then the task force disaffiliated from Heritage altogether.

Speaker 5 It was so interesting just hearing that quote of Roberts essentially saying this guy has an audience, and you know, that means something.

Speaker 5 I feel like the idea of trying to grapple with these internet influencers who are building their audiences versus these institutions that say they have values, I feel like this is not going to be the last time that these two things bump into each other.

Speaker 6 I think these kind of little fires are going to pop up here and there because you really had the fringe move into the mainstream on the right, and they've really struggled to figure out what the appropriate message is.

Speaker 5 All right, we're going to take a quick break and more in just a moment.

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Speaker 5 And we're back. And we've been talking about the follow-up from Tucker Carlson's interview with Nick Fuentes and how the conservative movement is addressing issues of anti-Semitism in its ranks.

Speaker 5 Dominico, we should note here that this is not just on the right. You know, the progressive movement and the left have also struggled with this issue of anti-Semitism.

Speaker 5 Is this different? I guess is it different between the two political sides?

Speaker 6 Aaron Powell, Jr.: Yeah, I think that there's some gradients of nuance here that's a little different.

Speaker 6 I mean, what we've seen on the right has really been groups of people who kind of have this as a foundational piece of what they believe, white supremacist groups, white nationalist groups that glommed onto the Trump movement in 2015, 2016.

Speaker 6 And it really was an online phenomenon in a lot of respects where you saw a lot of harassment of people who were Jewish online,

Speaker 6 Jewish reporters. So this goes back quite a ways with white nationalists kind of moving into or trying to move into the mainstream, using the Republican Party and the Trump movement to do so.

Speaker 6 I think what we've seen on the left has really kind of come up because of the war in Gaza.

Speaker 6 You've seen a lot more people kind of talk out from the left, from younger progressives, in saying that they feel like the war in Gaza shouldn't be taking place and and standing up for Palestinians.

Speaker 6 And sometimes that rhetoric has crossed into areas that people like the Anti-Defamation League would consider anti-Semitic. You know, and that's been called out.

Speaker 6 And I think that's been a struggle on the left and continues right now with that.

Speaker 3 Aaron Powell, yeah, in my reporting for this story, I spoke with Amy Spitalnik, who's with the Jewish Council for Public Affairs.

Speaker 3 Now, that's a nonpartisan group, but a group that tends to lean progressive.

Speaker 3 And she said she is concerned about what she's seeing on both the right and the left, including you know, a tendency to conflate Jews and Jewish communities with Israel or the Israeli government.

Speaker 3 But, you know, in the bigger picture, she said this is something that she hopes that people across the political spectrum will be aware of and call out where they see it.

Speaker 3 So she said, you know, she was pleased to see people on the right calling this out within their own ranks.

Speaker 5 Well, it's interesting. I feel like.

Speaker 5 You know, Fuentes is obviously not the only influencer on the right who kind of traffics in ideas that many people would consider offensive, racist, anti-Semitic, whatever word you want to use there.

Speaker 5 Where is the line right now, Sarah, in terms of what the conservative movement seems to deem acceptable versus not?

Speaker 3 I mean, that is the question, as we've said, and I think it's still being worked out.

Speaker 3 I mentioned earlier, you know, people like Candace Owens, her rhetoric has become increasingly, I think many people would agree, anti-Semitic, anti-Jewish.

Speaker 3 So it's not only people like Nick Fuentes that are generating this concern.

Speaker 3 And, you know, Tucker Carlson's decision decision to spend this time with him, to have this long-friendly conversation, you know, I think it needs to be understood in the context of the internet and the sort of online media ecosystem in which we all exist.

Speaker 3 I talked with Mark Goldfetter. He's with the National Jewish Advocacy Center, and he was a member of the task force at Heritage to fight anti-Semitism.

Speaker 3 He stepped away from that, as many others did, as I mentioned.

Speaker 3 But Goldfeder said that he thinks Tucker Carlson's decision to do this, to spend this time with Fuentes, is really about the way that online media works.

Speaker 9 You know, there's a market value here. There's an incentive towards sensationalization.

Speaker 9 So, you know, of course, Tucker has to get more and more extreme each week if he wants to keep those clicks coming.

Speaker 9 And I think, unfortunately, it's a perfect storm because anti-Semitism is very cheap and easy and always available.

Speaker 3 Possibly the oldest bigotry that there is, people have said.

Speaker 3 And easily malleable for those who choose to exploit it, especially in an online environment.

Speaker 6 I think the line is hard to see exactly. I think it depends on the platform and who pushes back,

Speaker 6 how much of a platform either one of those has. You know, and I think that this has changed some from the right

Speaker 6 because of them trying to tag the left as anti-Semitic. So they don't want to be seen as promoting anti-Semitism in a big

Speaker 6 platform like this.

Speaker 6 And then also at the same time, trying to say that people on the left are anti-Semitic. But

Speaker 6 again, this is part of know, what we've seen crop up on the right when white nationalists have gotten involved with politics.

Speaker 5 Aaron Powell, Jr.: Well, the other thing I wonder about in terms of whether this issue is a thornier issue for conservatives versus progressives is the Republican Party over the last few years has really campaigned on this idea of no censorship, you know, anti-cancel culture.

Speaker 5 And how do I mean, I wonder about how does that play into this in terms of does that make it more difficult to then set boundaries when you do decide that something is too far?

Speaker 3 Aaron Powell, I mean, I think it clearly does.

Speaker 3 You saw that conversation sort of being worked out, you know, almost in real time in that Heritage Foundation staff meeting where people were saying, Look, you know, there is a line.

Speaker 3 There has to be a line. Look back at history.
We've drawn lines before. This is the argument.

Speaker 3 There's a difference between cancel culture and having a sort of sense of who we are and who our values are. But I do think you make a good point, Miles.

Speaker 3 In an environment where we're not canceling people, where we're being open to any kind of conversation conversation is sort of a point of pride. It makes it harder to draw those lines.

Speaker 3 And so I think perhaps what we're seeing is at least one dividing line here is between maybe the old school traditional conservative movement and the

Speaker 3 new, maybe younger far-right movement that's arisen online in recent years and particularly in the Trump era.

Speaker 6 Aaron Ross Powell, there can certainly be a good for me, but not for the equality. And that kind of hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty certainly can hurt you politically.

Speaker 6 But I think what we've really found here is that a lot of what's coming from the right as far as the standing up for free speech and wanting conservatives not to be censored on campuses is not really a principled line.

Speaker 6 It's about politics and about being able to make sure that their point of view is heard, not necessarily that they're suppressing the other side.

Speaker 5 Well, I kind of want to bring it back to the nitty-gritty politics of all of this because I think my basic instinct tells me that bringing people on the ideological fringe who say offensive things into the fold will naturally alienate more centrist, more moderate voters.

Speaker 5 Does this really matter, I guess, to the median voter the way we think it does?

Speaker 6 Aaron Powell, there are a lot of things that matter to people, right? But not everything is motivating for people to go to the polls. Some people maybe

Speaker 6 don't like Trump's personality or the way he does things or the voice that he gives to extreme comments, but they liked in the first term, you know, how he was economically or whatever, right?

Speaker 6 People have a lot of different things that motivate them to vote. Obviously, in the last election, it was about cost of living and affordability.

Speaker 6 And we saw that come into this election last week as well. And I think that's going to be the dominant issue that carries on to the 2026 midterm elections, most likely, too.

Speaker 3 And I think if there's one thing that the last decade or so has taught us, it's that where the hard hard lines are for some people may be different from where they are for Donald Trump himself.

Speaker 3 I mean, I think this has been widely observed. It's something I've seen in many conversations with Trump supporters at many rallies and elsewhere over the years.

Speaker 3 This idea that, you know, whatever he says, however it may sound, however it may land at the time, and whatever the blowback may be, his supporters are often willing to hear it however he wants them to hear it.

Speaker 3 And they're willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. They tend to say, you know, that's just how Trump talks.
So, you know, can Tucker Carlson get away with it?

Speaker 3 Can Kevin Roberts get away with it? I don't know. But Donald Trump has pretty consistently been able to because he has, you know, that really robust and enduring base that we talk about so much.

Speaker 5 All right, well, we can leave it there for today. I'm Miles Parks.
I cover voting.

Speaker 3 I'm Sarah McCammon. I cover politics.

Speaker 6 And I'm Domenico Montana, Senior Political Editor and Correspondent.

Speaker 5 And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics podcast.

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