Nick Fuentes enters the Republican mainstream in softball Tucker Carlson interview
Blatantly fascistic video streamer finds nothing but love from former Fox host
This article was first published by Right Wing Watch.
Podcaster and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson devoted more than two hours of his online show Monday night to soft-pedaling the extremism of the unapologetically racist, misogynist, antisemitic, and anti-democracy online personality Nick Fuentes.
Carlson’s friendly interview was the latest and biggest stop in a recent string of right-wing podcast appearances with hosts that have allowed Fuentes to whitewash his well-documented bigotry and extremism—thus furthering Fuentes’s stated strategy of pushing the Overton window and the entire conservative movement far to the right.
Echoing other hosts’ justification for platforming Fuentes, Carlson claimed that his goal was to let his audience hear for themselves what Fuentes thinks. The audience got to hear Fuentes claim, “I’m not one of those haters,” but they didn’t learn why that statement is so wildly at odds with Fuentes’s long and well-documented record.
Listeners who made it through the entire interview did get to hear Fuentes express his contempt for women and his theories about how young men are being ruined by marijuana, feminism, and pornography. (On that front, Carlson and Fuentes agreed that porn is making “a lot of people” gay and trans.)
The two commiserated at length over what they see as their mistreatment by the Republican establishment over their criticism of Israel. They apologized for each having previously accused the other of being a fed. Carlson suggested that the way Fuentes talks about American Jews and Jewishness itself as a problem made it easier for their critics to dismiss all of them as antisemites.
But, shamefully, Carlson never raised any of the most viciously and sometimes violently antisemitic statements Fuentes has made—like saying Jews should not be allowed to hold public office—or his frequently expressed admiration for the genocidal Adolf Hitler. Fuentes even gave him an opening when he described the Hitler-loving Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) as one of his two heroes—the other being Trump.
Carlson never asked about Fuentes’s own description of “what it would like to build a society based on our distinct worldview” – in which contraception, fornication, homosexuality, and pornography are illegal and women can’t go to school, be part of the workplace, or vote, and are burned at the stake for being witches.
Carlson couldn’t even be bothered to follow up when Fuentes revealed his soft spot for dictatorship in this country. Fuentes said he could remember the date of a particular incident because it happened on Josef Stalin’s birthday, which he said is “an important date to me.”
Fuentes described himself as a fan and admirer of Stalin, an extraordinarily brutal dictator responsible for systematic suppression of freedom and for millions of deaths. Carlson seemed surprised by Fuentes stanning for Stalin, and said, “We’ll circle back to that,” but he never did, and thus never explored Fuentes’s clearly expressed desire to replace American democracy with a fascist totalitarian white Christian nationalist dictatorship.
You’d think that would be a worthwhile topic for an interview supposedly designed to let people hear what Fuentes thinks.
Fuentes’s authoritarian impulses were revealed once again when the two talked about the increasing tensions over the Trump administration’s violent attacks on immigrants in Chicago and the growing public resistance to them.
“I see all the ingredients of, like, a low-boil civil conflict, full-blown civil war, and I’m not that guy, but I see all the ingredients there for that to happen,” Fuentes said. Carlson agreed, saying “I do, too.”
Carlson asked how Fuentes would handle things if he were president. “They have to crush the other side,” Fuentes said, adding that it was necessary to “utterly confront” the left “and defeat them and remove hope from the equation.” If you do anything less than that, he said, you’re simply antagonizing and energizing the other side. “That’s right,” Carlson agreed.
“If I were Trump, I would say, ‘Screw 200 National Guard. Arrest the mayor of Chicago. Arrest the governor. Shut it down. Make it clear … Bring in the troops and say the federal government is supreme. The immigration law is the law of the land. If you’re not on board with that you’re going to jail.”
Carlson’s chummy interview with Fuentes has generated some criticism from right-wing pundits.
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