MAGA is at each other’s throats again after Tucker Carlson sat with a self-proclaimed white nationalist for a lengthy interview.
The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro used the entirety of his show on Monday—titled “Tucker Carlson Sabotages America”—to rage at the ex-Fox News pundit, whom he described as an “intellectual coward,” a “dishonest interlocutor,” and a “terrible friend.”
That outrage followed Carlson’s two-plus-hour interview last week with Nick Fuentes, who casually uses the N-word on his streams, is proudly anti-semitic, and says racist Jim Crow laws were “better for us.”
Shapiro rarely dedicates his show to a single issue, but said it was necessary to give his viewers a “brief glimpse into the twisted mind” of Fuentes, who is 27. He aired over a dozen clips of Fuentes’ most outrageous remarks—like him saying that “a lot of women want to be raped.”
Still, Shapiro made clear he is most peeved that Carlson—formerly a top MAGA figure, who has split with the coalition this year over the striking of Iranian nuclear sites and the suppression of the Epstein files—is normalizing such hate.
“The issue here isn’t that Tucker Carlson had Nick Fuentes on his show last week,” Shapiro said. “He has every right to do that, of course. The issue here is that Tucker Carlson decided to normalize and fluff Nick Fuentes, and that the [Project 2025 authoring] Heritage Foundation then decided to robustly defend that performance.”
Shapiro said Carlson has crashed and burned since his abrupt departure from Fox News.
“Nick Fuentes’ philosophy is not fully formed,” he said. “It’s an incoherent stew of malignity, but that’s where Tucker Carlson enters the story. Now, since his exit from Fox News in 2023, when, of course, he was a very, very popular host, Tucker Carlson has turned himself into a conspiracist and a crank and a pathological liar.”
It is not just Shapiro taking aim at Carlson.
Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, who had his own viral spat with Carlson this year, indicated he was equally appalled by the pundit’s lack of pushback to Fuentes’ remarks, which included him saying the “big challenge” to unifying the U.S. is “organized Jewry.”
“If you sit there with someone who says Adolf Hitler was very, very cool and that their mission is to combat and defeat ‘global Jewry,’ and you say nothing, then you are a coward, and you are complicit in that evil,” Cruz said.
Condemnation of Fuentes and Carlson has not been universal on the right.
Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts posted a video in which he denounced the “venomous coalition” criticizing Carlson, whom he called a “close friend.”
“The Heritage Foundation didn’t become the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement by canceling our own people, or policing the consciences of Christians, and we won’t start doing that now,” Roberts said.
