Nick Fuentes hit the jackpot.
The white-nationalist influencer made it on the “Tucker Carlson Show,” the nation’s foremost vehicle for laundering noxious ideas into the conservative mainstream.
Fuentes is a Holocaust-denier and self-avowed racist whose goal is to remake the right in his image.
Carlson, who prides himself on asking the supposedly telling questions when it comes to promoting any number of conspiracy theories, couldn’t really bring himself to ask any of Fuentes. Instead, he gave the 27-year-old Nazi sympathizer a tongue bath and said at one point of the Fuentes ideological project, “I guess you won.”
This was just another day in the office for Carlson. The former Fox News host has made it his business to promote antisemitic tropes and conspiracies. What Stephen A. Smith is to sports talk, Tucker Carlson is to obsessive anti-Zionism. There is almost no anti-Jewish theme — dual loyalty, usury, sinister plotting — that he doesn’t elevate, although he occasionally stipulates that he likes Israel and has no interest in talking about it.
When Carlson interviewed Ted Cruz before President Donald Trump launched his strikes on Iran nuclear sites this year, he bristled with hostility for the hawkish Republican senator from Texas. When Cruz noted that Carlson seemed fixated on Israel, the podcaster retreated to his favorite dodge that he was just asking questions.
Obviously, though, if your questions all tend toward one set of insinuations — casting aspersions on one country and suspicion on one group of people — you aren’t engaged in genuine inquiry but instead are pursuing an agenda while trying to maintain a modicum of plausible deniability.
A while ago, Carlson welcomed on his podcast a crank historian with revisionist views on World War II, Darryl Cooper, and enthusiastically endorsed him as “the most important historian in the United States” (move over Gordon Wood, Niall Ferguson and Allen Guelzo, among others). While Carlson served as his caddy, Cooper explained that Winston Churchill was “the chief villain” of World War II, while Hitler “didn’t want to fight.” According to Cooper, the Holocaust was just a product of inept military planning.
