Conservatives are having a divisive debate about antisemitism after prominent conservative media figure Tucker Carlson interviewed Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist who has become influential in the fringes of the Make America Great Again movement.

The reverberations have led to a dramatic staff revolt at one of the pre-eminent conservative think tanks and prompted rare intramural criticism from leading Senate Republicans.

Fuentes has long used his massive internet footprint to promote racist and extremist views, such as telling Alex Jones in 2021 that non-Christians such as Jews have no place in Western civilization. In his friendly chat with Fuentes, Carlson did not confront him about those past statements nor did he push back during the interview when Fuentes said Jews are not loyal Americans.

Fuentes contended that "the main challenge to" unifying the country is "organized Jewry in America."

That sentiment has been condemned by some Republican lawmakers, such as Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who called out Carlson for failing take Fuentes to task during the segment.

"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.

Carlson's interview with Fuentes comes on the heels of at least four recent instances of Republican officials being associated with Nazi symbology or ideology, including reports of young GOP group members joking about gas chambers; the Trump administration pulling a nominee for saying he had a "Nazi streak," a swastika within a U.S. flag being spotted in a Republican congressman's office and the revelation that an online neo-Nazi influencer is married to a local Republican elected official in Michigan.

"A version of America that is no longer safe for Jews to live in securely, and that is overtaken by anti-Israel zealots, is not an America that any conservative should want to live in," said an Oct. 30 editorial in the National Review, the flagship conservative magazine, condemning the Carlson-Fuentes interview.

From alt-right fringes to dining with Trump

Fuentes, 27, climbed the far-right ranks after he first became known as the pro-Trump host of a show called "America First," on a conservative YouTube channel while still a Boston University freshman. He gained notoriety for attending the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, at which white nationalists chanted "Jews will not replace us," in reference to the racist, anti-immigrant "Great Replacement" theory.

He has subsequently amassed millions of followers on X and about half a million on Rumble, a video-sharing platform, where he streams his podcast that mainly targets Gen Z men who flock to reactionary online voices.

Fuentes got an audience with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2022, when he dined with the president and Kanye West, a world-famous rapper who has made similar antisemitic remarks.

But more than any recent event the two-hour Oct. 27 sitdown with Carlson − which has raked in roughly 6 million views on YouTube − has introduced Fuentes to a new audience.

"Tucker Carlson has long played a role as the kind of figure in the MAGA media who would legitimize extremists and sort of bring them into the fold," Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters, a left-leaning watchdog group, told USA TODAY.

"He functions as a taste maker, when he hosts someone like Nick Fuentes, he is presenting them to a massive audience particularly the sort of younger-staffer wing of the Republican Party that really take heed of what he says."

Carlson has also been accused of promoting far-right ideologies and conspiracy theories since before parting ways with Fox News, where he hosted its highest-rated primetime program until 2023. Among them is the "Great Replacement," which holds that elite liberals − in some versions, specifically Jewish liberals − seek to systematically replace America's white majority with immigrants of color.

The Carlson-Fuentes interview has caused a major rift among Republicans, conservative commentators and advocacy groups who disagree over whether denying Fuentes a platform amounts to the "cancel culture" they have long decried on the left.

Heritage Foundation struck amid Fuentes' evolving relationship with MAGA

The fracture began when Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, the well-connected conservative think tank that created the Project 2025 blueprint for Trump's second term weighed in. Carlson, has longstanding ties to Heritage, including giving the keynote address at the group's 50th anniversary celebration in 2023.

Roberts posted a two-minute video after the interview saying he wouldn't denounce the host and blasting Carlson's critics as part of the "globalist class." The American Jewish Committee says that "globalist is a coded word for Jews who are seen as international elites."

Roberts later backpedaled, but not before five members of Heritage's antisemitism task force resigned in protest and two scholars, Chris DeMuth and Stephen Moore, a former Trump advisor, left the organization.

"We have zero tolerance for antisemitism," Andy Olivastro, the Heritage Foundation's chief advancement officer, said in a Nov. 7 message, shared with USA TODAY by a Heritage spokesperson. "It is evil, and we will always confront it head-on."

Fuentes had previously been repudiated by mainstream conservatives: In 2023, he was booted from the Conservative Political Action Conference over his "hateful racist rhetoric and actions" and denounced by the Republican National Committee.

But in a fractured media landscape, Fuentes and other voices who espouse more extreme views on race and gender have gained a foothold with major figures on the right such as Carlson.

"The Heritage Foundation is afraid of Tucker Carlson and his audience," David French, conservative New York Times columnist, said in an Oct. 30 post on X. "The fringe is now the mainstream, and one of the most powerful institutions in the American right is bending the knee."

Young conservatives less supportive of Israel

Part of what's driving the rift is there is noticeably less support for Israel among younger U.S. conservatives than before, due in part to the MAGA populism that has been injected into the GOP.

A Pew Research Center survey released in April found Republicans under age 50 are about as likely to have a negative view of the foreign ally as a positive one. Over the past three years, the survey found, younger GOP voter's negative views of Israel jumped from 35% to 50%.

While Trump has staunchly supported Israel, even joining its summer bombing campaign against Iran, those attracted to the president's nationalist "America First" rhetoric are less sympathetic to Israel.

Now the Trumpian isolationists, with the support of online masses, are competing for dominance with the more hawkish and Christian evangelical wings of the Republican Party, which tend to be very pro-Israel.

Carlson, who did not respond to USA TODAY's request for comment, has dismissed critics of the interview, telling fellow former Fox News host Megyn Kelly this month that those naysaysers don't control his programming.

"You’re not my editor," he said. "Buzz off."

Carlson has increasingly used his platform to criticize the president's handling of the conflict between Iran and Israel since leaving Fox News, saying Trump is "complicit in the act of war" in a newsletter. His confrontational joust with Cruz in June, went viral after he grilled the senator about Iran.

Speaking at the Federalist Society 2025 National Lawyers Convention this month, the Texas lawmaker and former Republican presidential candidate, who is a staunch Israel ally, said it's easier for the GOP to denounce Fuentes.

But Cruz called attention to how few are interrogating Carlson in the same way.

"I can tell you my colleagues almost to a person think what is happening is horrifying," Cruz said during his Nov. 8 remarks about the uproar over the interview, "but a great many of them are frightened because (Carlson) has one hell of a big megaphone."While there is little polling on what the Republican side may want in a post-Trump presidential contender in 2028, some political observers have suggested Carlson's firebrand style could make him a top candidate down the line.

The current rift on the political right illustrates the dilemma conservatives felt in the aftermath of 31-year-old Charlie Kirk's assassination in September, when some Republicans sought to censor negative remarks about the slain conservative activist.

Ben Shapiro, a pro-Israel conservative commentator, acknowledged on a Nov. 5 episode of his popular podcast that there is a "fragmentation" occurring on the political right.

He described Fuentes as "odious and despicable" but denied that he and others would seek to prohibit him from expressing his views on any platform.

"It is not cancellation to draw moral lines between viewpoints," Shapiro, who is Jewish, said on his popular podcast.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Tucker Carlson's interview with Nick Fuentes exposes widening MAGA antisemitism rift

Reporting by Phillip M. Bailey, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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