By Jonathan S. Tobin
(JNS) — Nick Fuentes had good reason to celebrate. He is the leading example of the so-called “groypers” — the term applied to the particular brand of fanatical antisemites and far-right extremists for which he is the leading spokesperson. Any doubt that he was gaining ground in his efforts to be mainstreamed in American political discourse was removed on Sunday by President Donald Trump.
He was asked what he thought about Tucker Carlson giving Fuentes a friendly interview on his podcast.
The president replied, “You can’t tell him who to interview.” Trump publicly dined once with Fuentes in Mar-a-Lago along with Kanye West, another prominent Jew-hater, in 2022, and then afterwards claimed that he didn’t know who he was. He seemed to be repeating that story now by saying that he “didn’t know much about” Fuentes. Still, as far as he was concerned, if Carlson wanted to interview Fuentes, then “get the word out,” the president said. “People have to decide. Ultimately, people have to decide.”
While the claim of ignorance might have been credible three years ago, it doesn’t hold up anymore, especially after the debate among conservatives over Fuentes that has been raging in the last month.
While Trump and his supporters can claim that this doesn’t constitute an endorsement of the young antisemite, that wasn’t how the groyper leader — a figure with a large following on social media — treated it. He shared the video of the Trump statement with the comment, “Thank you, Mr. President.”
That’s a defeat for decent people, regardless of where they stand on the political spectrum, who would like to relegate extremist trolls like Fuentes to the fever swamps on the far right and out of mainstream discourse.
The willingness of Trump and others to tolerate Carlson — and now, apparently, Fuentes — has created a crisis about antisemitism on the right.
This is shocking — and not just because one would have thought that no sensible person, regardless of political affiliation, would have thought a softball interview of Fuentes, in addition to other antisemites and Israel-haters Carlson has hosted on his show in the last year, would have been defensible.
But those who are voicing outrage about what Trump just said, as well as the other examples of those who rushed to Carlson’s defense, are missing something important. The argument isn’t so much about whether Fuentes’s hate is laudable. It’s about “gatekeeping.”
The notion that some views, like Fuentes’s particular variant of neo-Nazi lunacy, are so abhorrent that they ought not to be considered worthy of discussion, let alone a fair hearing, has become completely discredited among many conservatives.
A not-insignificant portion of political thinkers and voices on the right seems to have adopted the position that shutting down discussion of any opinion — no matter how disgusting or immoral — is wrong. And many people who may not be comfortable with extremists in any other context are nodding along with the defense of Carlson because of this.
In a saner era, conservative thought leaders would not put up with such appalling views being treated as debatable, let alone something decent people should tolerate. That is exactly what William F. Buckley, the founder of modern conservatism, did in the 1960s to the extremists of the John Birch Society, and again, in the 1990s to antisemites like Pat Buchanan and Joseph Sobran. Buckley’s “gatekeeping” was long celebrated by conservatives as evidence not only of his leadership but of how the political right was able to discard crackpots and achieve enormous political victories.
That kind of gatekeeping isn’t merely out of fashion on the right. It is currently being viewed as wrong and somehow no different from the cancellations meted out to dissenters from the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) or the idea that America is an irredeemably racist nation by BLM and other progressives.
In its place is the sort of nonjudgmental attitude about extremism voiced by popular podcasters like Megyn Kelly, Matt Walsh and now, the U.S. president himself.
But just because leftists were wrong to accuse Trump of being a racist, a Nazi or — in an act of unconscious irony because he is the most pro-Israel president in history — an antisemite, and to do the same to others on the right doesn’t mean that there are no such things as racists, Nazis and antisemites.
Carlson’s decision not merely to platform but give the views of the repellent racist and Jew-hater a sympathetic and even supportive hearing has divided conservatives in recent weeks. More than that, he used the show to vent his own hatred for Israel, “Christian Zionists” — whom he denounced as guilty of “heresy” and suffering from a “brain virus” — and to float the traditional antisemitic trope about Jews being guilty of dual loyalty.
Most mainstream conservatives and Republicans treated this latest example of Carlson’s soft spot for Jew-hatred as conclusive proof that the podcaster and longtime member of the Trump family inner circle should be condemned as a hate-monger, rather than be treated as a star of the political right. Others, such as Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, as well as other right-wing podcasters like Kelly and Walsh, defended Carlson and condemned those calling him out.
Roberts walked back his claims that Carlson’s critics were “venomous,” as well as some of his claims that the issue was opposing efforts to force America to disregard its own interests to help Israel. But the continued willingness to treat Carlson as a friend, rather than someone to be censured and isolated, has led to an exodus of staffers, scholars and donors from Heritage and some of its task forces. They believe that an institution that had become a leading voice of opposition to the growing threat of left-wing Jew-hatred is fatally compromised by its ties to someone who is obsessed with disgust for Israel and the Jews.
Part of this is just another manifestation of the surge of antisemitism that was unleashed by the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Mainstreaming antisemitism
That demonstrated the way that the violent victimization of Jews seems to unleash the virus of hate against them that continues to plague civilization. That it exists on the right as well as the left, which has given up being judgmental about people who support the destruction of the one Jewish state on the planet, is tragic. It’s an objective that can only be achieved via the genocide of approximately half of the Jews in the world who live in Israel, and almost always involves the use of tropes, language and actions that are inherently and unabashedly antisemitic. At the same time, significant numbers on the right — though nothing close to the consensus on the left — have come to a similar conclusion, even though they arrive at it via a different ideological path.
The allergy that conservatives have developed to the idea that lunatics should not be tolerated is a problem that must be addressed. Trump’s acquiescence to this idea and Vice President JD Vance’s silence about the actions of Carlson, who is his personal friend and someone to whom he owes a political debt, is more than troubling.
The cancellations of the left and their intolerance for free speech remain a major concern. They still have no problem with shouting down or ensuring that conservatives and supporters of Israel don’t get a hearing on college campuses. That they treat their efforts to suppress the speech of others as a form of free speech that must be protected — their main argument against Trump’s efforts to defund schools that tolerate and encourage antisemitism — is nothing less than gaslighting.
However, if the right’s reaction to this lamentable state of affairs is to declare that nothing is out of bounds and that everything, including the unabashed racism and hatred of Fuentes, is something about which decent people must agree to disagree, then that is just as bad. It also contradicts normative conservative political philosophy from its origins in the writings of English statesman Edmund Burke to Buckley to those who are now seeking to defend the right from Carlson and Fuentes. Such ideas attack the basic notions that liberty is best defended by the preservation of traditions and norms that stem from the founding principles of Western civilization, and the legacy of Jerusalem, Athens and Rome.
The left’s war on the West isn’t purely one about silencing opposing views. It’s an assault on the beliefs that are the foundation of our civilization. The West cannot be defended by platforming and normalizing neo-Nazis and antisemites; that’s exactly how the left is seeking to destroy it. Being judgmental about hate isn’t weak or surrendering to political opponents. It’s time for conservatives, including those who are still traumatized by the intolerance of the left, to realize that defending their movement against hatemongers — which sometimes may require “gatekeeping” — is just as important as fighting against the insidious Marxist ideas of the left.