Posted on | November 1, 2025 | No Comments
About three weeks ago, I found myself on the phone with my buddy Evan Sayet, who had become very concerned about the growing influence of a certain type of “Christian nationalist” rhetoric on the Right. We talked a long time about it, and my argument was that the size and influence of this specifically anti-Jewish crowd has been exaggerated.
Here’s the thing: I don’t watch or listen to podcasts. The written word is my métier, and I can read a lot faster than anyone can talk, so that spending even 30 minutes listening to somebody talk is to me a sort of torture, a painful waste of time. This is true without regard to whether I agree or disagree with what the person is saying.
All of which is to say that the problem which concerned Evan Sayet was basically invisible to me, and I was dismissive of his concern. Who cares what some fringe kooks are saying on podcasts? Imagine my chagrin, therefore, when the whole Tucker Carlson/Nick Fuentes thing blew up this week, with the exclamation mark being supplied by students at a Turning Point USA event asking anti-Israel questions of Vice President J.D. Vance. Then the president of the Heritage Foundation waded into the controversy, and suddenly everybody is talking about the problem that Evan Sayet was trying to alert me about just three weeks ago.
Canary, coal mine, some assembly required.
It is astonishing to me that Nick Fuentes has sufficient influence to cause this much trouble, or that he and others (Candace Owens is frequently mentioned in this context) have succeeded in spreading their Jew-hating nonsense so widely among young MAGA types that J.D. Vance found himself having to deal with it at a TPUSA event. The question of why Tucker Carlson has drifted in that direction in the two years since he left Fox News is also worth investigating. My guess is that Carlson is engaged in some sort of destructive vendetta against those he blames for his ouster from Fox News. Here’s the Wikipedia summary of that:
On the morning of Monday, April 24, 2023, Fox News dismissed Carlson and the executive producer of his evening show. It does not appear that Carlson received advance notice of his dismissal, given that on Friday, April 21, in what became his final show’s sign-off, he told his viewers that he would “be back on Monday” . . .
Fox did not provide a reason for Carlson’s termination. The Los Angeles Times wrote that Chairman of Fox Corporation Rupert Murdoch was responsible for the firing, and that a pending lawsuit from former Fox producer Abby Grossberg and Carlson’s coverage of the January 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection both influenced the decision. The Wall Street Journal wrote that Carlson was dismissed due to private messages in which he criticized Fox’s management, using vulgar and offensive language.
A thirst for revenge can make someone do crazy things, and I don’t for a minute doubt that Tucker feels justified in viewing “mainstream conservatives” as less than honorable, considering how many of them didn’t take his side in the dispute with his former employer. So the split between Fox and Carlson had the effect of making Carlson feel that most conservatives are spineless wimps, leading him off into the Dark Side where paranoid mutterings about the “Israel lobby” are a permanent obsession — or that’s my theory, anyway. Your mileage may vary.
The aftermath of the past week’s drama is that a lot of people are now choosing sides in a grand internecine squabble on the Right, a Jets-versus-Sharks situation I lament. And I must ask: Cui bono?
Who benefits from this conflict? And is it possible that the participants in this fight are being manipulated by agents provocateurs? Is it paranoid to suspect that someone — China, Russia, Qatar, Iran, the CIA, whoever — has infiltrated the online Right in order to stir up chaos and conflict?
Put that thought aside for a moment and, if you have the stomach for it, watch the whole two-hour Carlson-Fuentes interview:
The Nick Fuentes Interview
(0:00) The Origins of Nick Fuentes
(17:10) The Daily Wire’s Efforts to Destroy Fuentes
(35:02) Why Fuentes Decided to Challenge the Conservative Establishment
(46:25) Why Did Fuentes Attack Joe Kent?
(57:31) Identity Politics
(1:01:55) Why Did Fuentes… pic.twitter.com/slCKkjqKv5— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) October 27, 2025
If you don’t feel like wasting two hours of your life, permit me to quote Dominic Green in the Wall Street Journal:
Mr. Carlson’s hosting of Mr. Fuentes on his podcast, which aired Oct. 27, was a watershed in the campaign to make racism cool again. Mr. Carlson has come a long way since the bow-tied folly of his neoconservative youth. After leaving Fox News in 2023, he went over the edge. He donned the plaid shirt of the people, rediscovered Christianity, cashed in on his legacy status as a ringmaster of the right, and reinvented himself as the second coming of Alex Jones. Mr. Carlson has interviewed a podcaster who thinks Winston Churchill was the villain of World War II, raised discredited claims that Ashkenazi Jews are immune to Covid, and claimed that Benjamin Netanyahu openly tells Israelis, “I control the United States. I control Donald Trump.”
There is always a market for the circus, but Mr. Carlson has become one of the freaks. Though the sunshine of free speech remains the best antiseptic against poison, Mr. Carlson is more interested in the spotlight than serious debate. He “normalized” his guest with the gentlest of questioning, nodding along as Mr. Fuentes said the country can’t be held together unless “organized Jewry in America” is defeated. But there is nothing normal about Mr. Fuentes. He denies the facts of the Holocaust, opposes interracial marriage, seeks “total Aryan victory,” and urges the rule of a “Catholic Taliban.” He calls for “the death penalty” for an “occult element at the high levels of society, specifically among the Jews,” that is “suppressing” Christianity.
Now, I do not like Green’s use of the phrase “make racism cool again” to describe this anti-Israel message because, among other things, the Left attacks Israel as being “racist” against Palestinians. But his listing of some of the more obnoxious things Fuentes said in this interview is at least helpful in understanding what the controversy is about. If you’re going to nod along amiably to stuff like that, maybe it’s time for you to log off the podcast and check into a psychiatric facility.
My friends, remain calm. Do not panic. Just suppose, for the sake of argument, that the Nick Fuentes/Candace Owens crowd is a million people, or two million, or even five million. Last year, Donald Trump got 77 million votes, so it’s not like this Jew-hating tail is large enough to wag the MAGA dog. On the other hand, given the closeness of the partisan divide — Trump’s national margin of victory was about 2 million votes, and it was very close in most of the “battleground” states — we have to contemplate whether the disaffection of even a few million MAGA voters might be enough to enable the Democrats to regain power.
Certainly we’re doomed if the Republican Party returns to being a neocon/uniparty swindle with an agenda of empty slogans, open borders and “forever wars.” Given a choice between Bushism and Trumpism, I choose Trumpism for the simple reason that Bushism has proven to be a losing formula, both in terms of politics and policy. But you’re not going to make me accept Jew-hating bile from my supposed MAGA “friends” anymore than I’m going to accept it from the pro-Hamas “progressives.”
How this controversy plays out over the next few weeks or months, I can’t predict, but I have been forced to start paying attention, at least.
Not a battle I wanted to fight, but not one I aim to lose, either.
Irony Alert: “Visibility limited … Hateful Conduct.” pic.twitter.com/4KRryMImVZ
— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) November 1, 2025
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