In recent weeks, Mr. Carlson’s friendly conversations with white supremacists have created a rift among Republicans and sparked drama at major think tanks.
Tucker Carlson and Ted Cruz discuss US involvement in Iran
Conservative media star Tucker Carlson has slammed Republican Sen. Ted Cruz regarding US military actions in Iran.
Conservatives are divided over anti-Semitism after prominent conservative media figure Tucker Carlson interviewed Nick Fuentes, an influential white supremacist on the fringes of the Make America Great Again movement.
The backlash sparked a dramatic staff revolt at one of the prominent conservative think tanks and a rare in-house criticism from leading Senate Republicans.
Fuentes has used his vast internet footprint to spread racist and extremist views for years, including telling Alex Jones in 2021 that Jews and other non-Christians have no place in Western civilization. In a friendly conversation with Fuentes, Carlson did not confront Fuentes about these past statements, nor did he refute when Fuentes said during an interview that Jews are not loyal Americans.
Fuentes argued that “the main challenge to unifying the country was an organized Jewry in America.”
Those sentiments have been criticized by some Republicans, including Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who accused Carlson of holding Fuentes to task during the segment.
“If you sit down with someone who says that Adolf Hitler was very, very cool, that their mission is to fight and defeat world Jewry, and you don’t say anything, you’re a coward and you’re complicit in that evil,” Cruz said.
Mr. Carlson’s interview with Mr. Fuentes came on the heels of at least four recent incidents in which Republican officials have associated Nazi symbols and ideology, including reports of members of the Young Republican Party joking about gas chambers. These include the Trump administration dropping a candidate for having “Nazi tendencies,” the discovery of a swastika inside an American flag in the office of a Republican lawmaker, and the revelation that an online neo-Nazi influencer is married to a Republican lawmaker from her home state of Michigan.
An October 30 editorial in National Review, a leading conservative magazine, condemned Carlson Fuentes’ interview, saying, “An America that is no longer safe for Jews to live in and has been taken over by anti-Israel fanatics is not the America that conservatives want to live in.”
From alt-right extremists to dining with Trump
Fuentes, 27, rose to prominence on the far right during his freshman year at Boston University when he first became known as the pro-Trump host of a conservative YouTube channel called “America First.” He became famous for attending the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where white supremacists chanted “Jews will not replace us,” referring to the racist, anti-immigrant “Great Replacement” theory.
He has since amassed millions of followers on X and around 500,000 followers on video-sharing platform Rumble. Rumble streams podcasts aimed primarily at Gen Z men who flock to reactionary voices online.
Fuentes had an audience with President Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2022 when he dined with Kanye West, a world-famous rapper who has made similar anti-Semitic comments.
But more than any recent event, his two-hour roundtable discussion with Carlson on Oct. 27 (which has racked up nearly 6 million views on YouTube) introduced Mr. Fuentes to a new audience.
“Tucker Carlson has long played a role in the MAGA media as someone who legitimizes and brings extremists into the fold,” Matt Gertz, a senior researcher at the left-wing watchdog group Media Matters, told USA TODAY.
“He’s functioning as a sensemaker, and when he entertains someone like Nick Fuentes, he’s introducing it to a large audience, especially the younger Republican staffers who really listen to what he has to say.”
Carlson has also been accused of promoting far-right ideology and conspiracy theories even before parting ways with Fox News, where he hosted the highest-rated prime-time show until 2023. This includes the Great Replacement, in which elite liberals, especially Jewish liberals, are systematically replacing America’s white majority with immigrants of color.
Carlson’s interview with Fuentes has sparked a major rift among Republicans, conservative commentators and advocacy groups over whether Fuentes’ rejection of the platform constitutes the “cancel culture” that the left has long denounced.
Heritage Foundation launched as relationship between Fuentes and MAGA evolves
The rift began with the involvement of Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that created the blueprint for President Trump’s second term Project 2025. Carlson has a long-standing relationship with Heritage, having given the keynote speech at the organization’s 50th anniversary celebration in 2023.
Roberts posted a two-minute video after the interview in which he said he did not intend to criticize the host and accused Carlson of criticizing him as a member of the “globalist class.” The American Jewish Committee says, “Globalist is a code word for Jews who are considered part of the international elite.”
Roberts later backed down, but five members of Heritage’s anti-Semitism task force resigned in protest, and two others left the organization: scholar Chris Demas and former Trump adviser Stephen Moore.
“We have zero tolerance for anti-Semitism,” Andy Olivastro, the Heritage Foundation’s chief advancement officer, said in a Nov. 7 message that a Heritage spokesperson shared with USA TODAY. “It is evil and we will always confront it head on.”
Mr. Fuentes had previously been rejected by mainstream conservatives. In 2023, Fuentes was expelled from the Conservative Political Action Conference for his comments. “Hateful and racist remarks and actions” and was denounced by the Republican National Committee.
But in a fragmented media landscape, Fuentes and other voices espousing more extreme views on race and gender have gained a foothold with key right-wing figures like Carlson.
“The Heritage Foundation is afraid of Tucker Carlson and his audience,” conservative New York Times columnist David French said in an Oct. 30 post on X. “The fringe is now the mainstream, and one of the most powerful organizations on the American right is bending the knee.”
Young conservatives have lower support for Israel
Part of what’s causing the rift is that support for Israel among young American conservatives is significantly less than it used to be, due to the MAGA populism injected into the Republican Party.
A Pew Research Center study released in April found that Republicans under the age of 50 were about equally likely to have positive or negative views of foreign allies. Over the past three years, negative views of Israel among young Republican voters have jumped from 35% to 50%, the survey found.
Although President Trump is a staunch supporter of Israel, including participating in the bombing campaign against Iran in the summer, those attracted to the president’s nationalistic “America First” rhetoric are less sympathetic towards Israel.
Now, pro-Trump isolationists are competing for supremacy with the more hawkish, Christian evangelical wing of the Republican Party, which has strong pro-Israel leanings, with the support of the online public.
Carlson, who did not respond to USA TODAY’s request for comment, dismissed critics of the interview earlier this month, telling fellow former Fox News host Megyn Kelly that these naysayers do not control his show.
“You’re not my editor,” he said. “Please turn off the buzzer.”
Since leaving Fox News, Carlson has increasingly used his platform to criticize the president’s response to the Iran-Israel conflict, calling Trump “complicit in acts of war” in a newsletter. His June showdown with Cruz went viral after he slammed the senator about Iran.
Speaking at the Federalist Society’s 2025 National Bar Conference this month, the former Republican presidential candidate, a Texas congressman and staunch ally of Israel, said it would be easy for Republicans to censure Fuentes.
But Mr. Cruz called attention to how few people are questioning Mr. Carlson in the same way.
“I can tell you that my colleagues think what’s going on is horrible,” Cruz said of the uproar at the Nov. 8 press conference. “But (Carlson) has such a huge megaphone that a lot of his colleagues are scared.” He is a top candidate.
The current rift on the political right highlights the dilemma conservatives felt after the assassination of 31-year-old Charlie Kirk in September, when some Republican politicians sought to censor negative speech about the slain conservative activist.
Pro-Israel conservative commentator Ben Shapiro acknowledged on the Nov. 5 episode of his popular podcast that there is a “split” on the political right.
He described Fuentes as “disgusting and despicable,” but ruled out trying to ban him or others from expressing their opinions on any platform.
“Drawing moral lines between viewpoints is not cancellation,” Shapiro, who is Jewish, said on his popular podcast.
