TWO weeks ago Tucker Carlson interviewed the podcaster Nick Fuentes. The interview immediately provoked a firestorm of response in both mainstream and alternative media.
Many British people may not have heard of Fuentes. He’s the 27-year-old commentator often cited as the figurehead of the Groypers, a group of young online radicals who delight in breaking cultural and social taboos on the kind of things that can be said on public forums or shared spaces. Fuentes for example has praised Hitler on multiple occasions, and that’s the kind of level of thinking we are talking about. The following is fairly typical of the majority of his content: ‘Jews are running society, women need to shut the f— up, blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part, and we would live in paradise; it’s that simple.’
Even if Fuentes advances some positions that are mainstream conservative ones, like a belief in Western civilisation or a claim to be opposing leftism and wokeness, he aways discredits and undermines them with racist and foul-mouthed extremism. All of this is part of a package of making controversial and offensive statements to drive clicks and engagement and become a famous person.
It’s true he’s built up a following of just under a million subscribers, but leftists and mainstream media have long treated Fuentes as a much more serious and influential figure than he actually is. It’s deeply dishonest and a smear to pretend that he has any link to the Trump administration. Far from being a champion of the youth wing of MAGA, Fuentes has been highly critical of Trump on multiple occasions and is part of the same group of people (which includes Tucker Carlson) who are scornful of Trump’s Jewish family links and support for Israel. Jew-haters in the US have increasingly attacked Trump as an ‘Israel First’ leader, and Fuentes posted that there was a war for control of the US Right between those controlled by the ‘Jewish lobby’ and those who genuinely put (in his eyes) America First.
This genuinely unhinged reading of the US President correctly supporting an allied nation fighting against Islamic terrorists was added to by Carlson, who states that he hates ‘Christian Zionists’ ‘more than anyone else’ (therefore more than corrupt Democrats, more than Marxists and Communists, and more than Islamists, terrorists and child abusers). A wide range of supposedly right-wing sources posted articles supporting Tucker.
All of this has been of enormous assistance to the Left and the Democrats as a means of deflecting from anti-Semitism becoming rife in their own base, from student and activist support of Hamas, and from the constant drumbeat of anti-Israel extremism from both Muslim and hard left leaders within the Democrat Party. It enables them to skip questions regarding exactly what representatives like Ilhan Omar or New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani (who called for a ‘global intifada’) really think about Jews.
As the Democrat Party has become more and more extreme itself, to the point of electing candidates such as Jay Jones who fantasised about murdering Republican children, its relentless move towards the hard left has combined with ever more rabid hatred of Trump, until its use of the words fascist and authoritarian and Nazi has extended with ever bolder shamelessness to encompass anything and everything even vaguely right-wing.
The manner of thinking about Jews that Fuentes represents, the conspiratorial idea that Jewish money, influence and power creates all the problems America faces, is in fact advocated by leading Democrats in the same way as it is advocated by Fuentes or by Carlson. The left’s claim of protecting Jews from right-wing Nazis is quite clearly a lie, but remain a surprisingly effective one: 33 per cent of New York’s Jews voted for Mamdani, who embraced Muslim terrorism on the campaign trail by praising an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center Bombing. Both what’s been called the Woke Right (Tucker, Candace Owens, Feuntes) and the extremist Democrats share the same attitudes towards Israel, and therefore towards Jews since ‘anti-Zionism’ so frequently exists as a fiction by which Jew-haters pretend they would stop hating Jews if only Israel didn’t exist. Both, too, are highly critical of Trump and exist in a perpetual state of extremist outrage, whether that comes as falsely depicting Trump and his administration as servants of Israel or whether it comes from describing them as Nazis. The truth is that Jew haters of the Fuentes ilk and the extremists in the Democrat Party hate both Jews AND Trump, while existing in a mutually beneficial relationship with each other. People like Tucker or Fuentes need a mad Democrat Party to justify their existence, and mad Democrats need people like Tucker and Fuentes to justify their supposed ‘Resistance’.
Nor is the attempt to smear MAGA and the Trump administration with Tucker’s descent into Jew-hatred limited to dishonest Democrats. An Establishment conservatism that has failed to protect Western populations from mass immigration and failed to uphold Western values or protect Western citizens also has a vested interest in falsely associating the Trump administration (doing the sensible things Conservative Inc hasn’t done) with the kind of Jew-hating madness Tucker and Fuentes engage in.
Indeed, when we look at this whole alleged ‘split on the Right’ properly, we see it in the context of 80 years of the left using the horrors of Nazism and the evil of antisemitism as a scatter gun shooting assassination of every right-wing principle. This if anything though makes it all the more important for the innocent, like Trump and hopefully like Vance, to fight against such smears by false association. The quickest way to do that would be, in this instance, to do as the Establishment Right demands. People like Owens, Feuntes, and Tucker must be cut off from the MAGA core and from access to the administration. Not only would that give the moral clarity that is needed at a time of growing extremist antisemitism from multiple sources, but it also works as an effective and obvious counter to the constant and insane rhetoric that casts defending national borders, enforcing immigration laws and fighting entrenched corruption (the real MAGA projects) as white supremacy and fascism.
The likes of Tucker and Feuntes have always been somewhat unbalanced, even before Tucker’s Jew hatred became as obvious and explicit as that of Feuntes. Candace Owens began her career as a leftist race grifter and has recently gone so far as to accuse Trump of killing Charlie Kirk. Tucker Carlson privately opined in 2020 that he hated Trump with a passion and wanted him gone. These people have never been true friends of MAGA or any real right-wing cause, but simply adopted that persona for a time when it advanced their careers to do so. There’s no better way to answer lies from the left or from Establishment figures regarding the nature of MAGA and Trump’s second term than to make it plain that Tucker’s descent into apparent anti-Semitic madness, or that of any other influencer, has nothing to do with the efforts of the 2nd Trump term to restore American sanity, greatness and competence. Far from being aligned with such an agenda, Tucker and co represent the very opposite and are an embarrassing and cancerous attachment to right-wing politics that can and should be swiftly excised.
Whether it’s genuine belief or cynical clickbait, these people don’t care if they damage the reputation of the right or if the things they now advance are evil and harmful. Carlson recently implied Mamdani, a Marxist Islamist, was more America First than Trump, which is a genuinely insane position to advance. Fuentes in the Tucker interview spoke about how much he admired Stalin, which should have indicated to everyone that this person’s extremism isn’t really a reflection on right-wing politics. That Trump has been a stalwart friend of Israel and of Jews is something to be proud of, not ashamed of. Both the hatred of Jews and charges of being an Israel First candidate must be met head on by condemning these grifters and racists and emphasising that there is nothing right-wing, just as there is nothing rational or true or America First in hating Jews and spinning paranoid fantasies about one of the strongest allies, in Israel, the US has.
It shouldn’t be done because the Left demand it but because it’s the right and moral thing to do, the sensible right-wing thing to do, like the rest of the Trump platform, and because it so directly answers the false smears placed against the administration by far more extreme opponents. Divorcing from these anti-Semitic talking heads will be pragmatic as well as moral. Tucker’s content has become a pus-filled sore. Fuentes’s content always has been. For the good of both America and MAGA, this poison must be lanced.
Those claiming to be more America First than Trump are literally obsessing on Jews and hating Israel when Democrats are doing exactly the same and when a Red-Green alliance, both Marxist and Islamist, has just captured New York. The Trump administration simply cannot be harmed by damning all their houses and distinguishing itself as the true home of sanity in an age of unreason.
