From thefp.com
There’s a fight being waged for the soul of the right. It has taken the form of a reckoning over podcaster Tucker Carlson’s cozy interview with white nationalist Nick Fuentes last week. Carlson, an able debater, gave basically no pushback to Fuentes, a man with avowedly pro–Adolf Hitler, proudly antisemitic, racist, segregationist views, and instead raved about how Christian Zionists disgust him.
The interview sparked a backlash, one that rapidly escalated after Kevin Roberts, president of the storied Heritage Foundation, came out in defense of Carlson and the interview last Thursday. After that, all hell broke loose. Lawmakers such as Ted Cruz, Rick Scott, Mitch McConnell, and Byron Donalds were joined by right-of-center influencers Ben Shapiro, Scott Jennings, and The Babylon Bee team in denouncing Fuentes, and Carlson for hosting him uncritically. (Roberts first blamed a subordinate for his ill-considered defense of Carlson, then apologized.)
But not everyone agrees that Fuentes should be off-limits for a friendly interview or that the fight to keep him outside the tent is one worth having. Vice President J.D. Vance, a close friend of Carlson, posted on X that “The infighting is stupid.” And there’s an effort afoot among online content creators on the right to brand any anger at Carlson and Fuentes as an attempt to silence criticism of Israel. They are arguing that they are being “canceled” for having the guts to point out that young people don’t like Israel anymore.
Nonsense. The fight roiling the right isn’t about young people turning on Israel. It’s a turf war between conservatives and content creators, between those who want votes and those who want views. And you have to choose. The online right has been pushing the Vance view that the real enemy is the left, and there should be “no enemies to my right.” But the racist poison being allowed in through the backdoor by the online right’s thirst for engagement is incompatible with the multiracial coalition built by President Donald Trump.
Over the last decade, the left tarred everyone to the right of Joe Manchin as a fascist, a Nazi, a racist. It was always a canard, yet now, far-right content creators have decided to try and prove that the left was correct by widening the Overton window to include the airing of Fuentes’s views in an uncritical manner.
In a recent example, Fox News contributor and YouTuber Brett Cooper posted a video condemning those seeking to keep actual Nazis out of the Republican Party. She read out an X post from Senator Cruz—“They don’t kill you because you’re a Nazi. They call you a Nazi so they can kill you”—and then accused Cruz of hypocrisy because he accurately pointed out that Fuentes admires Hitler: “So now you’re turning around and you’re calling somebody that you don’t like a Nazi,” said Cooper.
Did you catch the logic? Because the left called good-hearted conservatives Nazis, therefore no one can be denounced as a Nazi, including people who literally praise Hitler! What follows is: All Nazis must be welcome because the left called people who weren’t Nazis Nazis.
Checkmate, neocons!
It’s utterly ridiculous.
“These Republicans are using the exact same tactics that the left has been using against us for years,” said Cooper.
Wrong again. That’s not the right turning into the left; it’s the sound of Cooper and other content creators doing their best to prove the left right that conservatives are secret bigots. Somehow, they’ve managed to convince themselves that disagreeing with someone is itself cancel culture.
But contrary to what those sanitizing Fuentes want you to believe, the brouhaha isn’t “splitting the right.” It’s splitting the political and cultural right from the content creators who make their money off global, online audiences. Those creators have found that their online audiences crave anti-Israel content, and as a result, they have tried to frame the dustup as being about Israel and free speech.
The racist poison being allowed in through the backdoor by the online right’s thirst for engagement is incompatible with the multiracial coalition built by President Donald Trump.
This is obviously nonsense. It’s not a violation of free speech to condemn someone for nodding along as a white nationalist sullies everything Trump has built. It’s not cancel culture to say, “Actual Nazis are bad!”
Many online are pretending cancel culture on the left was bad because Nazis were excised from polite society. But cancel culture was bad because people who weren’t Nazis were excised from polite society.
If Carlson had Fuentes on his show to do a thorough critique of his antisemitism and racism—as he did of Cruz’s Christian Zionism—there may have been some backlash, but not from me. It was the unchallenged airing of bile and their frequent areas of agreement that smacked of sanitization.
Can you even imagine a person who advocates puberty blockers for children getting such a pass from a conservative influencer?
What those defending Fuentes are really saying is, “Free speech means Nazis get to be part of our movement.” Or at least, it’s a clever rhetorical device that is taken as a defense of their platform and ideas.
It sounds crazy when you lay it out like that—but it’s actually driven by a very real financial incentive. Many content creators make their money on social media. Here’s how it works: The algorithm feeds people content that’s similar to what they already like. It finds you an audience and then rewards you immensely for giving that audience exactly what they want.
The flip side is it penalizes you if you disappoint them. Your viewership can be instantly crushed if you start upsetting your audience with ideas they aren’t expecting. YouTubers and TikTokers are deeply connected to what their audience wants—because their entire livelihood depends on it. (Cooper’s Daily Wire show was literally called The Comments Section.)
People point to the millions of views popular podcasters get as proof of their influence and relevance, but content creators are deeply divorced from where the vast majority of Republicans and conservatives are on many issues, and this is why: They aren’t reading the room; they’re reading the comments section under their videos, which are filled with people who do not reflect the views of normal Americans.
Unfortunately, even grown-ups like Roberts at the Heritage Foundation forget that all these platforms have global reach. They look at a YouTube video that has 5 million views and suddenly think it means 5 million young American men agree with it, and we must not anger the young men by suggesting Hitler is bad!
This would all be less infuriating if Trump hadn’t just built the most multiracial working-class coalition the Republican Party has had in generations. Most people are duly proud of that, and behaving accordingly. On the week Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner was embraced by the left, Nazi tattoo and all, the right fired a group of Young Republicans for racist chats, and the White House pulled Paul Ingrassia’s nomination to lead the Office of Special Counsel for texting a group that he had a “Nazi streak.” I’ve been heartened to see how many Christians have stood up and vocally denounced Fuentes over the past week.
That’s the way to keep power, not with Nazis or those who would really rather you didn’t condemn them. Luckily, despite the best efforts of some podcasters, the GOP seems to understand that.