MAGA Rages at Tucker Carlson after “Nazi” Shocker Reveals Too Much

MAGA personalities are suddenly raging at Tucker Carlson, who just conducted a shocker of an interview with white nationalist and open antisemite Nick Fuentes. They’re attacking Carlson for hosting a “Nazi sympathizer” who espouses the “foundation of Nazism,” calling this “sick” and “despicable” and claiming it shows that the effort to “gatekeep the antisemitic, hateful freaks out of the Republican Party” has “failed.” We think one reason this angered right-wingers is that it revealed too much about MAGA: It can’t keep the hateful views at bay because the movement constantly traffics in similar ideas, albeit in somewhat more subtle ways. We talked to David Austin Walsh, the author of Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right. He explains how all this sheds light on the importance of racists and other extremists to the MAGA coalition, how it previews the coming post-Trump struggle over the MAGA movement, and how it captures the broader story of the American right’s refusal to police its extremists over the last half-century or more. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.