Tucker Carlson brushed off criticism over his decision to give Holocaust-denying white nationalist Nick Fuentes two unchallenged hours on his show when pressed by MAGA commentator Megyn Kelly.
Fuentes, who has said “Hitler is awesome” and called the Holocaust “like baking cookies in the oven,” appeared on The Tucker Carlson Show on Oct. 27.
Carlson framed the sit-down as an effort to “understand what people think.” But critics called it a softball interview for one of the far right’s most toxic figures, and even Kelly demanded an answer.
Kelly joined the pile-on on Thursday, using her SiriusXM show to question why Carlson didn’t challenge Fuentes’s record of antisemitism and bigotry.
“I mean, I personally have watched videos of him questioning the Holocaust,” she said. “Likening it to baking cookies in the oven and ‘there’s no way you could have gotten to six million’ seems to be his theory. He seems to think that we’ve way overstated the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust. He’s ripped on poor Usha Vance in the most offensive terms... So what do you say to those people who say, ‘Why didn’t you raise that?’”
Carlson, calm but clearly irritated, said, “You know, do your own interview the way that you want to do it. You’re not my editor. Buzz off. I mean, I don’t know. You want to go yell at Nick Fuentes? I’ll give you his cell. Call him and go sit and yell at him and feel virtuous or whatever. That’s up to you.”
He continued, “I got the same thing with Putin—‘why aren’t you yelling at him?’ Okay. Why? So I can show that I’m a good person? I care about what my wife thinks, my children think, and God thinks, and that’s it. I don’t need to prove that I’m a good person to you… I’m just doing my thing, which is I want to understand what people think. And if you don’t like it, don’t watch.”
The backlash to Carlson’s interview has been swift. Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, a onetime Fox contributor and now a leading voice at The Daily Wire, blasted Carlson on his Monday podcast as “the most virulent super-spreader of vile ideas in America.”
In February last year, Carlson travelled to Moscow and conducted a roughly two-hour interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the first formal sit-down by a Western journalist since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Prominent commentators accused Carlson of failing to challenge Putin on war crimes, the invasion of Ukraine, or Russia’s suppression of dissent.
During the Thursday interview with Kelly, Carlson insisted he doesn’t share Fuentes’s views. “I’m not telling Nazi jokes, obviously. I’m not telling them even in private because I’m not into that at all. But I will say, just since you brought it up, one thing that did bother me was the Usha Vance thing.”
He went on to defend his hands-off style, “I generally make it a practice not to be like, ‘you said this and the internet tells me or the ADL says you said this.’ It’s like, why don’t you just tell me what you do think? Like, why don’t you speak for yourself, because we’re adults. That is my approach with everybody, whether I like him or don’t like him.”
The far-right streamer has repeatedly denied the Holocaust, calling it exaggerated, and in one broadcast declared, “We are in a holy war… and I will tell you this: because we’re willing to die… we will make them die,” referring to Jews. He also targeted Usha Vance, the Indian-American wife of the Vice President JD Vance, asking, “What kind of man marries somebody named Usha?”
