Will Sommer writes:

Tucker Carlson interviewed white nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes on Monday, sitting politely as Fuentes criticized the power of “organized Jewry in America.” The right-wing internet has been in turmoil ever since.

Suddenly, nothing—including the racism, Holocaust denialism, and antisemitism Fuentes has championed—seems to be too hot for MAGA media to embrace.

That amounts to a catastrophe for more traditional conservative media figures. Breitbart’s Joel Pollak declared that the claims Fuentes made that Carlson left unchallenged amounted to “the foundation of Nazism.” The Daily Wire’s Andrew Klavan said that Carlson’s embrace of Fuentes would doom the right. Writer Rod Dreher wrote that Jewish friends had told him Fuentes is “the most dangerous man in America to Jews.”

None of those critics has a sliver of the audience and momentum that Fuentes enjoys—both of which will no doubt continue to grow now that Carlson has welcomed him as a reasonable figure worthy of his even larger platform. (Fuentes has 1 million followers on X; Carlson has 16.7 million.) And that’s precisely why anyone in the Republican party with a shred of principle left is sounding the alarm. Because, at the most fundamental level, Carlson has just accelerated the right’s already prominent tilt toward authoritarianism and hate. [Continue reading…]

Politico reports:

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) ripped the Heritage Foundation on Friday, as conservatives clash over the organization’s continued embrace of Tucker Carlson in the wake of his friendly interview this week with Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.

“Last I checked, ‘conservatives should feel no obligation’ to carry water for antisemites and apologists for America-hating autocrats,” McConnell, the former Republican Senate majority leader, wrote in a post on X. “But maybe I just don’t know what time it is…” [Continue reading…]