The Right’s Nick Fuentes Problem — and Tucker Carlson’s Role in Mainstreaming It
If you think the title of Ben Shapiro’s latest podcast episode lacks subtlety (“Tucker Carlson Sabotages America“), wait until you hear the rest of it. Shapiro characterizes Carlson as a “super spreader of vile ideas … coward … terrible friend … and master of gaslighting.”
In Monday’s monologue, Ben Shapiro did something most commentators on the Right are too scared to do: He drew a bright red moral line and named names. His warning was blunt. The American Right, he argued, is being deliberately fractured by a small but loud faction of white identitarians orbiting around Nick Fuentes — and that faction is being normalized and laundered into the mainstream by Tucker Carlson and, shockingly, defended by institutions like the Heritage Foundation.
Shapiro begins by defining what this fight is not about. It is not about free speech, and it is not about “cancellation.” Fuentes has every legal right to speak, he says, and Tucker has every right to interview him. Shapiro stresses that he has opposed de-platforming Fuentes, even though he considers Fuentes “odious and despicable.” Free speech, properly understood, is freedom from government coercion — not a right to be promoted, signal-boosted, and flattered by major conservative platforms.
What this is about, Shapiro argues, is drawing moral lines. Conservatives once understood that refusing to promote certain ideas — Nazism, open racism, calls for political violence — was not “cancellation,” it was sanity. Choosing not to launder those ideas for a mass audience is itself an exercise of free speech and free association.
To make the stakes clear, Shapiro walks through Fuentes’ own words. Fuentes has encouraged followers to “kill, rape and die” for him. He mocks Jim Crow as no big deal, claims white people are “justified” in being racist and avoiding black Americans, celebrates “Hitler Friday,” questions the Holocaust in cute “cookie” analogies, and repeatedly blames “the Jews” for every war and for secretly running the country. He fantasizes about executing “perfidious Jews” and other alleged enemies once his movement “takes power.”
This is not edgy trolling. It is explicit bigotry and totalitarian fantasizing, wrapped in pseudo-Christian rhetoric and aimed at alienated young men.
Shapiro then connects Fuentes to a bigger trend: The Left’s own identitarian turn has helped create a mirror-image movement. In response to years of elite contempt for whites, Christians, and men, some on the Right are gravitating toward a “white, pseudo-Christian, incel identitarian movement dedicated to destroying the institutions of this country and replacing Americanism with something else.” Fuentes is one of its loudest avatars.
Enter Tucker Carlson.
Since leaving Fox News, Shapiro argues, Tucker has increasingly reinvented himself as a “conspiracist and crank” and, crucially, as an ideological launderer for some of the worst regimes and figures on the planet. Shapiro points to Tucker’s soft-focus treatment of Vladimir Putin and Moscow, his kid-gloves interviews with Iran’s president and Qatari royals, and his bizarre praise for Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro as head of one of the “most conservative” countries in the hemisphere.
Over and over, Tucker downplays or excuses anti-American regimes while looking for ways to blame Israel, “neocons,” or American Jews for everything from Jeffrey Epstein to Middle East conflicts. He has described Christian Zionists — a major part of the GOP base — as heretics he personally dislikes “more than anybody.” He has suggested that figures like Nikki Haley and Shapiro himself are casually risking nuclear war over Israel and don’t care about America.
On their own, these are bad enough. But in Shapiro’s telling, Tucker’s real danger is the way he uses his huge platform to clean up other people’s filth. Tucker won’t say what Fuentes says. Instead, he invites Fuentes on, lets Stalin fandom and open bigotry skate by with a chuckle, asks sympathetic questions, and then retreats behind “I’m just asking questions” when challenged. The result: Ideas that would have been confined to fringe livestreams are now being introduced to millions of ordinary conservatives with a friendly gloss.
That, Shapiro suggests, is how you move Nazism from the dark corners of the internet to the edges of the GOP.
The betrayal, in his view, doesn’t stop with Tucker. Shapiro recounts how Nick Fuentes spent years trying to destroy Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA from within, boasting that he had “impregnated” the organization with his followers and urging his audience to “focus all our firepower on Charlie Kirk.” Kirk, to his credit, directly confronted Fuentes’ ideology as anti-American and fundamentally unconservative.
After Kirk’s murder by a far-left “trans-tifa” activist, Tucker became one of the main faces of TPUSA and spoke at Kirk’s memorial. There, Shapiro says, Tucker strongly implied shadowy “hummus-eating” Jews were really responsible, spent more time attacking Israel and Jewish influence than the trans ideology that actually motivated the killer, and has since gone on to launder Fuentes himself — the man who hated Kirk most.
For Shapiro, that is not friendship; it is a “sick evil.”
The final act in this drama is the Heritage Foundation. Shapiro speaks with real regret about Heritage’s president, Kevin Roberts, whom he knows personally and has long respected. But Roberts recently issued a statement not merely defending Tucker, but declaring that there is essentially nothing Tucker could ever do that would sever Heritage’s relationship with him — and suggesting that critics of that relationship are part of a “globalist” coalition working for “someone else’s agenda.”
In other words: If you object to Tucker Carlson mainstreaming a Hitler fan who wants “perfidious Jews” executed, you are acting on behalf of some foreign elite. Shapiro calls that a betrayal of Heritage’s history and of basic conservative principle.
Stepping back from the personalities, Shapiro’s larger point is both moral and pragmatic. Morally, conservatives cannot accept a movement that is pro-Hitler, pro-rape, pro-segregation, anti-Constitution, and openly bigoted against blacks, Jews, Indians, Latinos, and women — or a media ecosystem that keeps laundering those ideas as “just asking questions.” Pragmatically, Americans hate this stuff. Republicans, independents, and Democrats alike recoil from it. Hitching the Right to Fuentes-style extremism and Tucker-style apologetics for America’s enemies is a guaranteed path to electoral disaster.
Shapiro’s warning is stark: If the conservative movement allows itself to be hollowed out by neo-Nazis and their propagandists, it will not just lose elections. It will lose any claim to represent American principles at all.
Tyler Rowley is the founder of Right Mic, a newsletter startup, and an author with Ignatius Press.
READ MORE:
Trump Steers Conservatives Away From ‘Crackpot Alley’
The False Prophet of the Digital Right: What Nick Fuentes Really Sells
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