It has been a bad month for the MAGA movement. While voters were rejecting candidates aligned with President Trump, MAGA leaders were fighting with one another over how much antisemitic bigotry and extremism they should be welcoming into their movement. Not a great look.
At the center of the controversy was former Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s friendly interview with Nick Fuentes, a Hitler-loving, Stalin-admiring online personality who has built a following among alienated young white men with a daily stream of racism, antisemitism, misogyny, white Christian nationalism, threats of violence and a yearning for American democracy to be replaced with a fascist dictatorship.
Fuentes has been on a tour of right-wing podcasts, where interviewers have allowed him to polish his reputation and downplay his extremism. Carlson has been wallowing in far-right fever swamps since leaving Fox News, so it wasn’t terribly surprising that he became the latest to help Fuentes reach a broader audience.
What was surprising was that Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, arguably the most influential institution in the MAGA movement, felt compelled to mount a public defense of Carlson after conservatives began slamming his softball interview with Fuentes.
Roberts didn’t just defend his buddy behind the scenes. He recorded a video declaring that the conservative movement should not “cancel” Carlson or Fuentes. He vowed that Carlson, who has had a paid media relationship with Heritage, would “always” be a “close friend” of the think tank.
That was bad enough, but Roberts went even further, playing to a classic antisemitic trope by denouncing Carlson’s critics as a “venomous coalition” and part of the “globalist class.”
Roberts’s video created anger and turmoil within the Heritage Foundation and among its supporters and political allies. This continues despite his public and private apologies.
Roberts and Carlson are close. Roberts invited Carlson to be a featured speaker at a Heritage event during last year’s Republican National Convention, at which Carlson told the audience they were in a “spiritual war” against people who wanted to “kill Christians.”
Carlson has also been a huge fan of Vice President J.D. Vance — he encouraged Trump to choose Vance as his running mate — and the feeling has appeared mutual. Vance invited Carlson to the White House for an episode of the Charlie Kirk show that Vance hosted after Kirk’s murder. Carlson’s son works for Vance.
As would-be heir to the MAGA throne, Vance won’t be able to avoid taking a position on the “no enemies to the right” stance that some in the movement demand, which Roberts seemed to embrace in his video. That left some Heritage staffers questioning whether that meant a conservative big tent could not exclude people like Carlson or Fuentes.
Vance travels in shady circles himself, hanging out with far-right figures, some of them hostile to democracy and some harboring views not that far from Fuentes’s.
Vance recently downplayed racist and Nazi sentiments revealed in leaked Telegram chats among a group of young Republican professionals. Amid bipartisan outrage over the comments, Vance mocked “pearl clutching” over what he described as jokes among “kids” and “young boys.”
But they weren’t kids. Most of them were adults between 24 and 35, and Vance was urging people to give them a pass, the way the Trump administration has given a pass to officials who promote racism and conspiracy theories.
More recently, Vance spoke at a Turning Point USA event. One questioner, while asking about U.S. support for Israel, asserted that “not only does their religion not agree with ours but also openly supports the prosecution of ours.” Vance passed on the opportunity to challenge him.
In all of this, Fuentes has been triumphant. He claimed that Heritage was becoming “a safe harbor and springboard for people that are sympathetic to me and Tucker,” a milestone in his effort to have his followers — known as groypers — infiltrate the Republican Party and take over conservative institutions.
Pointing to Vance’s recent actions, Fuentes bragged that the vice president is caught in a “groyper squeeze,” between his need to please Republican donors and his desire to avoid alienating the groypers who Fuentes vows will dog Vance on the campaign trail.
This is a moment of the MAGA movement’s own making.
Since the launch of his first presidential campaign, Trump has energized nativists, white nationalists and Christian nationalists. He has emboldened bigots to express themselves proudly. He has invited them into his increasingly unpopular movement and administration, making the kind of clash provoked by Fuentes, Carlson and Roberts impossible to avoid.
Meanwhile, Democratic candidates triumphed all across the country, building strong inclusive coalitions and rallying young people with a vision of an America that works for all of us. That’s where our future lies. Let’s build it!
Svante Myrick is president of People For the American Way.
