Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) on Tuesday warned against giving a “platform” to antisemitic things that Nick Fuentes says in wake of Tucker Carlson’s interview with the fringe podcaster.
“Look, I heard a compilation of some of the worst things that Nick Fuentes has said,” Johnson told a National Review reporter in a brief hallway interview on Tuesday. “It’s absolutely outrageous some of the things he’s said, just blatantly antiemetic, racist, and anti-American, and anti-Christian for that matter.”
“I think we have to call out antisemitism wherever it is. And I don’t think, whether it’s Tucker or anybody else, I don’t think we should be giving a platform to that speech. He has a First Amendment right, but we shouldn’t ever amplify it,” Johnson said.
Carlson’s interview with Fuentes last week has spurred an ideological civil war on the right over antisemitism, cancel culture, criticism of Israel, and which figures are welcome in the conservative movement.
Signs at a Republican Jewish Coalition conference in Las Vegas over the weekend said, “TUCKER IS NOT MAGA.”
Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, on the other hand, posted a video statement Thursday asserting that a “venomous coalition attacking” Carlson over the interview with Fuentes was “sowing division,” and that the “attempt to cancel him will fail” — and that Fuentes also should not be canceled, but instead debated.
Following significant backlash, including from Heritage’s own staff, Roberts elaborated Friday on what he abhors about Fuentes’s views in another statement: “He is fomenting Jew hatred, and his incitements are not only immoral and un-Christian, they risk violence.”
Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro, meanwhile, spent his entire show on Monday excoriating Carlson for interviewing Fuentes.
“Tucker Carlson,” Shapiro said, “is an intellectual coward, a dishonest interlocutor, and a terrible friend.”
