Over the past few weeks, the American right has been fiercely debating a drama that begins with Tucker Carlson hosting an antisemitic young influencer on his podcast, and ends with a very public breakdown at the Republican Party’s premier think tank.
Is it a bit inside baseball? Yes. But it’s worth understanding. The details tell us a lot about where the conservative movement is, and where it’s going.
“Not to be too grandiose, but it’s the Spanish Civil War,” Jonah Goldberg, editor of the center-right publication The Dispatch, told Today, Explained co-host Noel King. “It’s previewing the bigger wars to come about what the right is about, who can be tolerated as part of the coalition, and who can’t be.”
Goldberg spoke with King about the crackup at the Heritage Foundation, the characters involved, and how it’s putting the maxim ‘no enemies to my right’ to the test.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Who are the main characters in what has unfolded in the past two weeks or so?
One is an institution, the Heritage Foundation, a storied think tank in Washington that’s over a half-century old. Second is the president of the Heritage Foundation, a guy named Kevin Roberts, who has moved it in a very populist, very Trump-aligned direction over the past few years. And then there’s Tucker Carlson, a guy I’ve known for more than 30 years, used to be a colleague at Fox, who after being fired from Fox, has launched his own independent media thing on the web and is doing strange things. And then lastly, is this really horrible gargoyle of a human being named Nick Fuentes. (Sorry, I try very hard not to think about the guy.)
He’s a leader of a group of mostly alienated, angry young men that in internet parlance or in social media parlance, people tend to call “Groypers.” He has made a real impact out there for saying the most horrendous things you can say in many respects. But he was one of the guys from the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. He does not dispute being called a neo-Nazi. And so maybe because I have the most Jewy name this side of Shlomo Abramowitz, you might not be surprised that I don’t feel like I can be in the same coalition as someone like a Nick Fuentes.
And this is about coalitions. Ultimately, this became about who is in whose camp. Tell us what happened.
Tucker Carlson had Nick Fuentes on his web show, Tucker Carlson Tonight or whatever it’s called. [Editor’s note: Carlson interviewed Fuentes on The Tucker Carlson Show. Tucker Carlson Tonight was the name of Carlson’s canceled Fox News show.] Very friendly, very softball interview where Carlson basically pushed back on none of Fuentes’ past statements and current beliefs or anything like that. And it was appalling. It was particularly appalling because we know that Tucker can ask hard questions. He can grill people. When he disagreed with Ted Cruz about the bombing of Iran, he barely let Ted get a word in edgewise and was constantly quizzing him to knock him off his game.
But when he talks to a guy who says he loves Stalin and Hitler and thinks women really want to be raped and all of these sorts of things, he’s like, Hmm, tell me more. You know, sort of channeling his old Barbara Walters or something like that. And so a lot of people were very cross about this at the Heritage Foundation, which advertises with Tucker Carlson. Tucker [was] the keynote speaker at their 50th anniversary gala [in 2023].
The Heritage Foundation got a lot of grief for its association with Tucker, and so Kevin Roberts came out and issued a video statement. Nobody disputes that the video statement was a complete frigging disaster. He said, “We will not disavow Tucker Carlson anyway. We will not cancel Tucker Carlson. We are joined at the hip with Tucker Carlson.” And then he said, “And besides, we’re not going to cave into a quote ‘venomous’ coalition that is representing other interests.” It was this serious dog whistle that suggested that string-pulling Machiavellian Jews were behind this [controversy], and we’re not going to cave into it. That was definitely the way it was interpreted by a lot of people outside of Heritage and a lot of people inside Heritage.
The video utterly backfired and caused a whole firestorm of controversy. And [Roberts] had this whole very high-minded explanation about how we shouldn’t cancel people. We should engage in their ideas, and we should confront them and argue in the marketplace of ideas — which all sounds great, except that’s not what Tucker Carlson had done. What Tucker Carlson had done was basically just give a megaphone to a neo-Nazi.
Kevin Roberts had an all-hands meeting at the Heritage Foundation. A big chunk of it was dedicated to warning staffers that they’ll be fired if any video or audio or quotes from this meeting leak. And almost before the meeting was over, the full video had been leaked. So everyone in my world has watched big chunks of it, if not all of it.
One of the things that the video revealed was that there are people at Heritage, young people at Heritage who are not neo-Nazis, but they liked Kevin Roberts’ initial statement. They’ve got some issues with Israel; they’ve got some issues with people who defend Israel. And then there were other people who were like, “You guys are losing your minds. We cannot be associated with antisemites and crazy people.” Kevin Roberts did not resign, as many people wanted him to, and many people thought he was going to be fired. But he did basically throw his chief of staff under the bus.
Kevin Roberts’s defense was basically that he is the right-wing Ron Burgundy. And if you put it in a teleprompter, he will read it. So it was not a profile-in-courage moment.
What does all of this mean? What is all of this about?
It’s about a lot of different things. Part of it is just simply an argument about what kind of coalition you’re going to have, but it’s broader than that.
One of the things that the defenders of Tucker Carlson and the defenders of the Heritage Foundation will say often — with a little more paranoia than I think is warranted — is that this is really all a proxy war about JD Vance. I think that’s overstated. It is not all a proxy war about JD Vance, but JD Vance does lurk in the background here, because Vance has blazed a path here where he defended young Republican officials who have these chats about how awesome Auschwitz jokes are and how Nazis are cool.
He also would not be vice president, but for the fact that Tucker Carlson lobbied extensively for him. And if Tucker becomes radioactive, that’s bad for Vance. If this crowd that [Vance] has defended and considers part of his coalition is purged, that’s bad for him. And so I do think that that’s part of what’s going on.
But I also think that, look: There are a lot of people who don’t think that the right should be a popular front. Historically popular fronts are this thing [that are] more popular, more common on the left — which on the left [meant that] there used to be no enemies to the left. It was like: Don’t shoot inside the tent. So what if we have Stalinists in our coalition? We’re trying to stop the bad guys. That’s the argument that is being used on the right right now, is that the right needs to become a popular front, needs to be a big tent. We need Groypers and Groyper-curious people to be part of our coalition, because they bring youth and passion and energy and yada, yada, yada.
I think it’s all nonsense. But it’s also hypocritical, because the very people like JD Vance and others who are trying to make the Republican coalition a safer place for these people say that we have to purge the neocons from the conservative movement — that we don’t want to hear from the zombie Reaganite crowd. They have no problem silencing and trying to cancel members of the coalition they consider to be rivals. They just use the language of inclusiveness for some of the worst people in the world, because they think there’s a political advantage to it.
It’s going to be a fight that’s going to unfold for a while, because Donald Trump — either for actuarial or constitutional reasons — is not going to be around forever. People are already trying to figure out what the post-Trump right looks like. And this is one of these early skirmishes in that longer-term battle.
