Dominic Green is an historian, deputy editor for the U.S. edition of The Spectator magazine, and contributing columnist for publications including the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Examiner, and the Jewish Chronicle. Green spoke to a November 17 Middle East Forum Podcast (video). The following summarizes his comments:
The twenty-first century dispute currently making news across America’s digital landscape has been fought before. During the 1950s, the “underbelly of the right in the U.S.,” a.k.a. “the old right,” peddled racism and isolationism. Those purveyors of hate were effectively countered by American conservative writer, public intellectual, and political commentator William F. Buckley, Jr. By taking a principled stand debating controversial guests who espoused un-American positions, Buckley “shaped the modern conservative movement.” He clearly staked out his position, consolidated a “movement, and pull[ed] all the threads together.”
Those purveyors of hate were effectively countered by American conservative writer, public intellectual, and political commentator William F. Buckley, Jr.
In today’s internet age of social media, Tucker Carlson, an influential conservative political commentator whose long television network career has featured hard-hitting interviews, has showcased un-American mouthpieces as entertainment on his popular podcast. Carlson’s relationship with Washington, D.C.’s, conservative Heritage Foundation, an institution which, “for a long time was a very staid” organization “priding itself on being solid, even boring,” amplifies a power struggle in the conservative movement as to who will be the successor to the Trump presidency’s “MAGA brand.” The brand’s populist appeal contributed to the ascendancy of two different tracks supporting the right in the conservative movement and the Republican Party base.
The Heritage Foundation fiasco surfaced in the wake of a series of “crank figures on the right” who were featured on Carlson’s podcasts. In featuring the “idiots, cranks, [and] downright un-American” guests on his show, Carlson’s provocative format of “just asking questions” revealed his own controversial positions.
He adeptly displayed his interrogatory skills grilling a recent podcast guest, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), over the latter’s support for Israel and regime change in Iran. Carlson’s own views have taken a markedly different direction than the Tucker of old—prioritizing Russia over Ukraine, defending Iran’s nuclear weapons program, minimizing “Islamist campaigns of subversion in the institutions of the West,” and even “finding the good in [Venezuelan dictator Nicolás] Maduro.”
The culmination of Carlson’s clickbait podcast was his softball interview with Nicholas J. Fuentes. Fuentes hosts his own podcast as the self-appointed leader of the “Groyper’” movement, a loose network largely comprised of isolated, angry, and disaffected white young men with far-right views. Fuentes’s podcasts regularly feature himself engaging in racist, Holocaust-denying, and white supremacist rants rife with conspiracy theories blaming America’s ills on Israel and the Jews.
Carlson’s interview gave Fuentes free rein and left him largely unchallenged. During the podcast, Fuentes spewed un-American, antisemitic, and racist remarks in an attempt to establish his foothold as an alternative to the mainstream conservative movement. Many expected leaders across the conservative landscape to condemn and marginalize Fuentes—and, by extension, Carlson—with one voice. Instead, those reacting include a fair share of high-profile equivocators. Although the right has attacked the “woke left” over the last decade or more for its culture of grievance and resentment, the right fringe is elevating a segment that is fast “becoming a caricature of the left” to the point that “the right is going round the horseshoe.”
Heritage president Kevin Roberts made a tone-deaf announcement in which he defended Carlson’s relationship with his think tank. The backlash against Roberts was swift and loud. Despite the resulting exodus of many of its donors and members, he has still held onto his office.
During the podcast, Fuentes spewed un-American, antisemitic, and racist remarks in an attempt to establish his foothold as an alternative to the mainstream conservative movement.
Above the noise and heat generated by Carlson’s Fuentes interview is the reaction from Carlson’s personal friend, Vice President J.D. Vance. Vance’s political career was helped by Carlson, “who really cleared the path for Vance to become a senator in some ways by giving him the airtime.” Last year, Vance “did ridicule and dismiss Nicholas Fuentes as being beneath consideration,” but Vance’s weak response to Carlson’s interview of Fuentes and to the criticism heaped on Carlson gave the appearance that Vance has “allowed himself to have become tied to the biggest losers.”
Positioned as Trump’s “heir apparent” in the Republican Party, Vance is at the center of a “shadow war” being waged within the conservative movement. By failing to unambiguously declare that there is no room in the conservative tent for such outliers and for those who hold the door open for them, he misses an opportunity to follow William F. Buckley, Jr. Instead of criticizing Carlson, Vance took to X to dismiss as a “scumbag” a journalist who quite reasonably questioned the views of Carlson’s son, a staffer in Vance’s office.
“The clock is ticking” for Vance to “be credible” as a political adult. “Holding a coalition together does not mean trying to negotiate or bend a knee to its nastiest, most vocal element, which is effectively how he is looking.” Perhaps Vance will ultimately take steps to look presidential and “kick out the head cases,” but the time to act is now. As much as Vance may want to, he cannot dismiss the Fuentes controversy because “thanks to his good friend Tucker Carlson,” Fuentes is among the racists and conspiracists who have gained a foothold at Heritage. Worse still, the same element exists among a percentage of Congressional staff members. “And so, day by day, Vance is doing tremendous damage, I believe, to his candidacy.”
The collapse of “mainstream conservative fusionism” that occurred between “the Iraq war and the financial crash of 2007-8” produced the Trump presidency and “the idea of MAGA.” The ensuing struggle that “was bound to happen” in the movement could either have an upside or downside. The upside is that it may result in a “real twenty-first century popular conservatism that has broad appeal,” which seems to be the direction of Trump’s 2024 voter coalition. However, if reasonable moderates lose, the downside will be a party that becomes “hollowed out from within.” That outcome would be catastrophic for America and the rest of the world because the resulting void “becomes a vehicle for white nationalism.”
Such a catastrophe would be accompanied by “the dreamland of isolationism.” America cannot be a serious power if it is pushed around by those countries with “assertive foreign policies” who perceive isolationism as a retreat. “Nature abhors a vacuum, and therefore your rivals will immediately and very cheaply move into the spaces that you vacate.”
Despite the troubling indicators exposed by the schism, it is worth recognizing that the large numbers of Carlson’s podcast viewers are not just in the U.S. “A great deal of the audience is actually outside the U.S.” Foreign actors such as Russia, Qatar, China, and Iran pour huge amounts of money into social media to influence a domestic audience through the internet’s “back door into American debate.”
The generation formed by an education system co-opted by the left, along with the limited economic prospects this generation has faced since 2008, is now being “easily exploited.”
The MAGA movement was heavily influenced by Charlie Kirk, Turning Point USA’s (TPUSA) slain charismatic leader. Kirk created a “twenty-first century digital version of the broad-church, fusionist idea that you can have lots of different factions.” Tucker Carlson’s connection to TPUSA casts doubt on the organization’s direction. The reliance on one outlet like TPUSA as the conduit for galvanizing the next generation of conservatives exposes how the right failed to understand the position in which younger people today find themselves. The generation formed by an education system co-opted by the left, along with the limited economic prospects this generation has faced since 2008, is now being “easily exploited.” If the conservative movement had paid more attention to these events as they coalesced over the past two decades, it would have relied on “more than one vehicle” than just TPUSA, a movement that may not outlast Kirk’s legacy.
“So, the domestic and international stakes for this are tremendously important, [but] I am quite heartened by the fact that the vast majority of the conservative think tanks—who like to think of themselves as the brains of the right—and the vast majority also of elected Republicans, are rightly abhorred about” the corrosive influence of Fuentes and his ilk in the conservative movement.
“They recognize this is a poison that, in a multiracial society, having a party of racists is just a disaster.” It is encouraging “that many on the right have actually spoken out and rejected this and shown convictions that, as we saw, many on the left failed to show.”
