Will the Last Conservatives Please Stand Up?

Tucker, Fuentes, and the future of the American right

In the wake of Tucker Carlson’s shockingly cozy interview with neo-Nazi rabble-rouser Nick Fuentes, some say the American right is fracturing. Others would say the American right fractured long ago, and Tucker Carlson has merely shown us where the faultlines were.

My readership is eclectic, and some of you may be blessed not to know who Nick Fuentes is. Ben Shapiro has assembled a starter kit of clips here. Succinctly: Fuentes is a young streamer who has built a small media empire on peddling ideological fentanyl to deeply bitter young men. This drug mainly consists in Jew-hate, misogyny, and assorted other bigotries, with a side of general sexual deviance and even occasional pedophilia-laundering. His daily show is an endless performative stream of demagogic bilge, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. One could make a good case that it’s not worth recording any sort of dialogue with him, even to challenge his “ideas,” such as they are. But, in the spirit of Ross Douthat’s Interesting Times podcast, Carlson could have done so on the argument that however odious, Fuentes is popular, and as a journalist one should be curious about exactly what makes popular figures tick.

However, for those who didn’t fall off the turnip truck yesterday, Carlson’s actual goal was clear: to greet Fuentes as a kind of ally, offer some avuncular advice (which some are desperately calling “pushback”), and launder him into the realm of acceptable right-wing discourse. Not because Carlson necessarily shares Fuentes’s exact brand of prejudice, but because his own prejudice is a close enough cousin that Fuentes is politically useful to him. Fuentes hates all Jews, Carlson hates all Zionists (Christian Zionists most of all, he made sure to emphasize, though he now wants us to believe he’s very sorry and just “spoke in anger”). Perhaps, Carlson suggests, they could generously carve out an exception for Jews who are anti-Israel?

The day after the interview was released, someone noticed a quiet change on the donations page for the Heritage Foundation, Washington’s leading conservative think tank: Where the old copy had made a pitch to Tucker Carlson listeners, emphasizing their alignment, the new copy had scrubbed his name out (see before and after screenshots). The foundation’s close partnership with Carlson goes back years, including his keynote appearance at a major gala two years ago. They’ve also bought ads on his show, although it appears that this, too, had been quietly tapered off when someone finally woke up and looked at his guest list. But the key word in all this is “quietly.” The pressure was evidently mounting for the organization to say or do something more public. And on October 29, Heritage president Kevin Roberts finally gave it to them: a scripted declaration of the organization’s undying loyalty to Carlson, including a swipe at the “venomous coalition attacking him” and an assertion that Carlson and even Fuentes shouldn’t be “cancelled,” because something-something free speech (which of course wasn’t the point, but Roberts is still pretending it is, even in the latest iteration of his damage control phase).

Whereupon, predictably, all hell broke loose.

I used to have a casual liking for Carlson, but I was on to his schtick as of a few years ago. The penny-dropping moment for me was the way he covered the Russia-Ukraine war. It just became clear all at once that this was a guy with a special gift for telling his viewers what they want to hear, artfully mixed with just enough truth to make it halfway plausible. And yet, even in that very year, as my friend Brandon Showalter explains in an illuminating thread, Carlson was continuing to do important work on issues like the transgender crisis. He had the power to make real truth-tellers and whistle-blowers feel a little less lonely. One can see why he was viewed as a conservative ally.

But over time, in an arc also summarized in Ben Shapiro’s take on this whole affair, it became progressively clear what Carlson’s personal priorities were, who he hated most, and who he was willing to whitewash. Some people had their lightbulb moment when he sucked up to Vladimir Putin, others when he sucked up to the president of Iran, still others when he sucked up to Andrew Tate. Some noticed that he didn’t just welcome fair-minded criticism of Israeli policy, but outright Hamas propaganda. All blended together and served up to a rapidly growing audience, with the enticing hook that this was the secret knowledge THEY didn’t want you to know. And who are THEY? Well…you know. THEM.

All this and more renders thoroughly unimpressive Kevin Roberts’s attempt to triangulate by hastening to clarify that he thinks Fuentes is bad while double-triple-quadrupling down on his blind loyalty to Tucker. In an interview, he fussed and pouted that we just weren’t ready for “a little bit of nuance.” And in his Hillsdale speech last night, he asked us all to understand that he was just trying to help the young men who are turning to Fuentes and falling for anti-Semitism. Of course, if he is under the impression that Carlson is a good-faith partner in that endeavor, then he’s either stupid or disingenuous. Which is why, as I write, the think tank is quickly hemorrhaging members of its anti-Semitic task force, who won’t be looking back until there is either a recantation or turnover. Meanwhile, the staffer who (it appears) wrote Roberts’s speech has resigned, after Roberts “reassigned” him to think tank Siberia in “housing policy” amid the backlash. I personally don’t see it as a sign of strong leadership to make subordinates take your L in such times. Other people’s mileage may vary.

I also find it amusing that Roberts keeps repeating the sacred importance of not bowing to “cancel culture,” when at this very moment there is an initiative to keep Heritage staffers who’ve broken with Roberts from getting a job anywhere else on the Hill. Carlson seems to be making his own list meanwhile, per a reaction statement to the press where he duly returns Roberts’s backscratching: “It’s shocking to me that a principled statement in favor of free speech would be controversial on the right. But it’s also clarifying. Remember who opposed it.”

Is that some sort of threat, Tucker? If so, bring it.

There’s also a deep and bitter irony in Roberts’s rhetoric about not “forsaking friends,” which he used during Q & A after last night’s speech. Again, I would ask whether he believes Tucker Carlson lives by this principle. Carlson claimed to be Charlie Kirk’s “friend,” after all. Yet immediately after speaking at that friend’s memorial service, Carlson approached Kirk’s vilest sworn enemy with a ticket to instant platform expansion. The despicable things Fuentes said about Kirk while he was alive are not a secret. (Granted, Fuentes did pivot for about five seconds to smarmy “let us all pause for a moment of respect” mode after the murder, only to resume business as usual by calling Erika Kirk a spook.) For my money, the very worst, most demonic clip Shapiro highlighted was this “message” Fuentes delivered mere days before Kirk’s murder:

I took Turning Point USA, and I f***ed it. I took your organization, I took your baby, TPUSA, and I f***ed it. And I’ve been f***ing it. That’s why it’s filled with groypers…We already own you. We own you, we own Turning Point USA, we own this movement. Whether you decide to have dignity about it and face me or not, that’s up to you. That’s something you’ll have to tell your children. When Nick Fuentes became the future, when the groypers took over the moment, did you take a valorant [sic] last stand? Were you courageous? Were you bold? Did you go down swinging, or did you go down like a b*tch? Did you run and hide? That’s the only thing, when you’re explaining that to your family, Mr. Family Man. When you’re explaining to your wife, when she’s saying ‘Why don’t you just debate Nick Fuentes?’ You gotta explain to her. When your kids grow up, ‘Why didn’t you just confront Nick Fuentes?’ You gotta explain to them why you were afraid, why you were a coward. That’s the only difference. Immaterial to me. We already won.

To say this little weasel is an unreliable narrator would be an understatement, so his demented victory lap here should be taken with several grains of salt. Overestimating the size of his audience risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. (Already the Times is positively salivating at the prospect of Fuentes as Kirk’s “successor.”) However, I’ve seen multiple sources confirming that he does have young male admirers among TPUSA chapter members, Hill staffers, and yes, even interns at the Heritage Foundation. Rod Dreher has quoted a friend ballparking the percentage among Hill staffers at 30-40%. Even if that friend is off by 10 or 15%, Houston, we have a problem.

The reasons for this are many and complicated, but one thing few people are willing to say is that some of us saw the seeds of this being sown ten years ago when Trump made his first presidential run. While Trump was never personally invested in the grievances of the alt-right, he functioned as a political chaos agent. He opened Pandora’s box, and all manner of creatures crawled out. Now yesterday’s bored, Internet-addicted adolescents are today’s jaded young 20-somethings, and Vice President J. D. Vance must do an artful tap dance if he wants to avoid co-signing groyper bilge while keeping groyper boys in “the movement,” whatever that phrase even means now. (Fuentes has threatened to sabotage Vance’s presumed 2028 run with “an army of groypers” unless he bends the knee, but whether this is mere empty saber-rattling remains to be seen. Fuentes was singing the same tune about Trump in 2024, thus proving that he has no fixed political ideology to speak of aside from his North Star of Jew-hatred.)

Charlie Kirk was, of course, Trump’s most enthusiastic political operative, and sadly Kirk was also stubbornly loyal to Tucker Carlson, so much so that he had a much-circulated immature private text outburst when a Jewish donor broke ties with TPUSA. Nevertheless, Kirk did recognize with crystal clarity the threat Fuentes posed to the young right, while also recognizing why Fuentes tempted them. He occupied a precarious position as a young communicator sitting between disaffected zoomers and establishment figures with deep pockets. He knew that there were faultlines within the Trump coalition. And with his passing, it’s become clear that there was no other conservative figure with Kirk’s unique gifts, occupying his unique position. Whatever slim hope there might have been of brokering some kind of cross-generational peace deal died on September 10. I believe it’s not a coincidence that Carlson is only laundering Fuentes now, when there is no longer a bulwark in the form of a young conservative leader who draws a bright line at what Fuentes is selling. I’d like to think that if he’d tried to pull it off while Kirk was alive, it would have opened Kirk’s eyes to the truth of who Tucker really was. We’ll never know.

There was another respect in which Kirk functioned as a bulwark, namely that he presented young men with a strong, tough, positive model of masculinity. There is a clear horseshoe effect of jealousy to be observed in the sick ravings of Fuentes and the simmering hatred of Kirk’s assassin. Both are damaged, sexually dysfunctional, and threatened by the image of a joyfully confident, secure young man raising a loving family. Like Gollum cursing the sun, they couldn’t tolerate it. Fuentes may not have killed Kirk, but he made it his mission to kill what Kirk had built. In this way, he and Tyler Robinson have worked hand in glove together, bound by the ties of infernal bitterness.

In this dispiriting moment, can American conservatism be salvaged? I admit, I despair as I watch how a certain faction of the right reflexively echoes each other in trying to wave this all away. Matt Walsh has been pushing his version of a “No Enemies to the Right” principle, complaining that this is all mere “gossip and drama,” a massive distraction from the prime goal of fighting the left. “We have a very short window of time where we control congress and the White House and have the power to push our agenda forward,” he tweets, and “We’re going to waste this window fighting with each other. We’re going to squander everything. I’m furious, honestly.”

But Matt, who’s “we”? Who’s “each other”? Is that not the very question at issue? Surely he’s not stupid, and he must know this.

I’ve seen similar rhetoric on the Christian right blaming “Con Inc.” for attacking Tucker and friends and urging Heritage to cut ties. But who is “Con Inc.” exactly? When I ask people in the disaffected right-wing camp to help crystallize this nebulous collective entity for me, I get a potpourri of names, from Bari Weiss to David French to Ted Cruz to anyone who writes for National Review. What makes this camp a natural kind, so I’m given to understand, is that they all want to maintain “the status quo” in Washington. The disaffected right, by contrast, “is ready to win.”

I will grant that there is a certain camp of what I’ll call “pseudo-cons,” pundits who flatter themselves that they are the standard-bearers of True Conservatism (™) while functionally selling out to the left. Some examples include Bill Kristol, who’s just endorsed Zohran Mamdani, John Podhoretz, and perhaps most infamously David French. These and other voices loudly excused themselves from the conservative family dinner table long ago, and they don’t deserve to be treated as if they never left. Then there’s still another camp of what I’d call “old liberal fellow travelers,” people like Bari Weiss or other Free Press columnists who’ve never shared social conservative priorities but capture a broadly center-right audience neglected by radical leftists. Neither the pseudo-conservatives nor the old liberals have a stake in the future of a robust social conservatism. Fine. Agreed.

Where the disaffected right loses me is when they, for their part, elevate certain issues to such a high level of priority that those issues eclipse what I see as the primary goals of a robust conservatism. In particular, they seem bent on alienating any conservative who doesn’t pledge allegiance to Pat Buchanan’s history of everything, and by extension to a Buchananite view of foreign policy. If you’re broadly pro-Israel, if you don’t think it’s a deep betrayal of “America first” to send weapons to Ukraine, if you think Trump and Vance treated Zelenskyy rather shamefully in their February White House meeting, you’re suspect. Conversely, if you’re Tucker Carlson and you’ve made “I fricking hate neocons and Christian Zionists too” your entire personality, you get infinity mulligans. You can literally spend two hours giving a rancid neo-Nazi a warm massage—in the name of Christ, no less, as Tucker unctuously claims a shared faith with Fuentes—and two days later a major Christian think tank leader will still spring to your aid with a scripted statement casually smearing your opposition. We must all pull together and focus on what’s really important, after all.

Do I think Roberts, personally, is an anti-Semite? No, but from the bits I’ve gleaned as I get up to speed on his contributions, he strikes me as a man very committed to his particular ideas about reshaping American Christian conservatism. This is significant, given Heritage’s “one voice” policy that forbids open disagreement within the organization. Roberts has made the political calculation that it will cost Heritage more to lose Tucker’s audience than to lose the many people he’s alienated by stumping for Tucker. Of course, in matters of principle, political calculations shouldn’t matter. But even if we do put on our election wonk hats for a moment and look at the numbers, they’re not that clear. Trump won with an eclectic coalition that included many swing voters, a lot of whom were simply disgruntled about the economy. This poll shows that a considerable number of people are rethinking that vote. What exactly will it profit Republicans to lose these voters while (possibly) gaining some equally fickle groypers?

I’ve seen some defenders of Roberts point to the failures of Heritage presidents past, like Kay Cole James’ writing a blank check to BLM during the George Floyd riots. I can fully agree that James represents the sort of limp pseudo-con leadership no one wants to go back to. I also have sympathy for friends whose cutting-edge research Roberts was vigorously backing, in areas of special interest to social conservatives—pushing back against in vitro fertilization, for example, which among other things was actually an important counter-signal of Trumpism. This was the sort of “Project 2025” stuff I could co-sign, as a lifelong proud member of Hillary Clinton’s “vast right-wing conspiracy.”

But all of this just makes it all the more tragic that Roberts has insisted on shackling the fortunes of Heritage to whatever a political saboteur chooses to do next. Which compels me to ask: Where did all the sane Christian conservatives go? Is it Roberts or the pseudo-cons, and no “none of the above”? Are there no leaders with the backbone to stand up and say no to Tucker Carlson while simultaneously saying no to the left?

If not, then American conservatism in general—and Christian conservatism in particular—is in a desperate place indeed.