Ali Breland writes:

Tucker Carlson slapped his nicotine-pouch container down on the table and got straight into it: “Nick Fuentes, thank you for doing this,” he said. “I want to understand what you believe, and I want to give you a chance, in a minute, to just lay it out.” The two were sitting in Carlson’s barn turned podcast studio at his home in Maine. In a more-than-two-hour-long episode of The Tucker Carlson Show that aired earlier this week, Carlson gave Fuentes, the 27-year-old white-nationalist influencer, access to one of the largest audiences he has ever had.

Although Fuentes has many dedicated fans, who call themselves “Groypers,” mainstream conservatives have long ignored him. Even as the Republican Party has come to embrace more extreme ideologies, he has been seen as too radioactive: Fuentes has praised Hitler on multiple occasions, likened “organized Jewry” to a “transnational gang,” and said that Chicago is “nigger hell”—in addition to many other racist and anti-Semitic statements. Just a few months ago, Carlson himself likened Fuentes to David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader, and accused Fuentes of being part of a campaign to say the most bigoted things possible to make the rest of the right look bad.

In the interview this week, Carlson was critical of Fuentes’s anti-Semitism. “It’s against my Christian faith,” he said, referring to Fuentes’s history of blaming Jewish people for political problems. “I just don’t believe that, and I never will, period.” Otherwise, the episode was notably friendly. Carlson largely focused on their shared beliefs—among them, opposing foreign intervention and racial diversity—and only lightly probed Fuentes at other points in their discussion. (Fuentes and Carlson did not respond to my requests for comment.)

The conversation seems to have marked a shift in the right’s attitudes about Fuentes. In the past several months, he has appeared on podcasts with Candace Owens and Dinesh D’Souza, but their conversations with Fuentes were much more critical than Carlson’s. The latest sit-down represents “the crumbling of the last kind of firewall on the right against Nick,” Ben Lorber, an analyst with Political Research Associates, a group that monitors the far right, told me.

Some conservatives, including writers for Breitbart News and The Daily Wire, have criticized Carlson’s softball interview. But many others are standing by Carlson. Yesterday, Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, posted a video statement defending Carlson from “the venomous coalition attacking him.” He continued: “I disagree with, and even abhor, things that Nick Fuentes says, but canceling him is not the answer either.” If Carlson can maintain support after talking to Fuentes, so can others.

In a 2021 episode of his livestreamed show, Fuentes said he wants to drag the Republican Party “kicking and screaming into the future, into the right wing, into a truly reactionary party.” His vision is coming true. Consider the leaked group chats of Young Republican leaders that were revealed by Politico earlier this month. The messages are full of the kind of anti-Semitic and racist jokes about the Holocaust and Black people that Fuentes has made as a livestreamer. Fuentes wasn’t directly referenced in the messages, though he claimed shortly after the leak that there are “Groypers in every department, every agency.” Vice President J. D. Vance called the messages “offensive jokes” and dismissed outrage over the texts as irrational “pearl clutching.” Fuentes celebrated the response on his livestream: “I never thought I’d see it ever, but Republicans are finally learning to play the whataboutism game, and I think that’s absolutely overdue.”

The gap between Fuentes and the rest of the right is narrower than it has ever been. [Continue reading…]