The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 4 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
MAGA personalities are suddenly raging at a surprising target, Tucker Carlson. They’re angry because Carlson conducted an online interview with white nationalist Nick Fuentes. In essence, what they said is that this interview helped allow Fuentes’s hateful views to get mainstreamed inside the GOP and MAGA coalition. But it occurs to us that all this bellyaching about Carlson and Fuentes might be less than sincere, and that it captures something essential about MAGA. MAGA can’t keep the hateful views at bay because the movement constantly traffics in very similar views, albeit in somewhat more subtle ways. The failure of this kind of gatekeeping on the far right is a story that goes back half a century on the American right, and this episode captures that story perfectly. So we invited on David Austin Walsh to explain all this. He’s the author of Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right, and one of the best out there at decoding all this stuff. David, good to have you on man.
David Austin Walsh: Yeah, thank you for having me.
Sargent: So Nick Fuentes appeared with Tucker Carlson, and that’s become a big story. Fuentes is known for all kinds of hateful rhetoric, including him saying about the Holocaust, “six million cookies. I’m not buying it.” He’s also said Jim Crow benefited its victims. There’s lots and lots and lots of stuff like that out there. David, can you quickly recap what happened in the Tucker interview?
Austin Walsh: So, Tucker gave Fuentes this softball interview, which went on for about two and a half hours. It was uploaded last week online. And Fuentes dialed back, to a certain extent, his most extreme rhetoric in order to sort of maximize his appeal.
I listened to most of the interview, and he didn’t really go on the insanely racist and over-the-top diatribes that, if you actually listen to his actual show, he’s always doing. But he did go on at length about the Jews and about sort of Jewish control of American foreign policy. He talked about Sheldon Adelson.
He also talked about how he sort of considered himself—because of the Jews, because of his sort of opposition to Jewish control of the Republican Party, as he sort of put it and that’s not a direct quote—but his opposition to sort of the mainstream conservative movement.
Sargent: Well, it’s clear that Tucker Carlson seems to have decided that he can’t afford to marginalize Nick Fuentes’ followers, who are sometimes called Groypers. At Vox, I thought Zack Beauchamp made a really interesting version of this point. David, can you explain what groypers are and why Tucker can’t afford to alienate them?
Austin Walsh: Yeah. And actually, this has been something that has been bubbling below the surface on the right for the past couple of years. And it’s really kind of thrown itself into a public view, just beyond the sort of closed circles of the right.
You know, it’s been said—before his assassination, the Know Your Enemy podcast or Sam Adler-Bell and Matt Sitman made this point a little while ago—it’s been said that Charlie Kirk was actually starting to kind of position himself in August and September, before he was killed, to sort of neuter or at least attempt to prevent a challenge from his right emerging out of sort of groyperdom.
So the Groypers are basically the followers of Fuentes. They’re more or less neo-Nazis. They subscribe to an extremely racist, extremely antisemitic, extremely misogynistic sort of set of views. I’m sure that many listeners have been following with interest that story that appeared in Politico a few weeks ago about a group chat leak featuring all sorts of conservative activists who were just saying incredibly racist and antisemitic and sexist things and making rape jokes and all the rest of it. Pretty bog standard in right-wing circles these days.
And that’s really what groyperism is at its heart. It’s a kind of internet culture that hinges on provocation and a kind of sense of mutual radicalization. But I will say this—that Fuentes, and he talks about this in the interview with Tucker, really came kind of out of nowhere. He was involved in a couple of conservative activist circles in 2016. He was a Trump guy, but then, because he very quickly went into, you know, explicitly racist, misogynistic, and antisemitic grounds, he was kind of on the fringe of the conservative movement.
He was present at Unite the Right here in Charlottesville, Virginia, where I currently live. But nevertheless, he has been able to build essentially a media empire. He’s got one of the biggest podcasts on the right. He exercises a tremendous amount of cultural influence there, and especially among these young conservative activists who are sort of constantly pushing the boundaries when it comes to, you know, racism, misogyny, and antisemitism.
Sargent: Well, I think that’s really why so many figures on the right have now gone after Tucker for hosting Fuentes on his show. Media Matters had a good roundup—I’ll read a few examples.
Breitbart’s Joel Pollak called Fuentes’s belief system ‘the foundation of Nazism.’ Rebeccah Heinrichs, who’s a right-wing think tanker, said it was ‘disgusting to elevate these views.’ Salem radio host Eric Metaxas called the interview ‘sick and despicable.’ Yet another one attacked Tucker for being ‘chummy with a well-known Nazi sympathizer.’
David, what’s going on here? Do these figures simply recognize just how damaging it is to the broader movement for this kind of thing to be blared forth and made so clear to everybody? Or is there some sincerity there among some of these figures?
Austin Walsh: There is this kind of narrative on the right that there have been these extremist figures in American politics that have flirted with neo-Nazism and explicit anti-Semitism and whatnot—that, you know, real conservatives, true proper American conservatives, have always sort of disavowed.
Now, with Fuentes in particular, what’s happening here—and we can also talk about the historical antecedents—is that, yeah, there is a kind of, I think there is a legitimate, genuine disgust with Fuentes in many of these circles. But there’s also a real fear that Fuentes can actually break through and become hegemonic in the Republican Party.
We wouldn’t be seeing this kind of anxiety in conservative circles if that weren’t the case. I’ve talked to a number of people who are sort of active in right-wing politics in D.C., and this is what they’re telling me—that, you know, Fuentes has a large audience, especially among conservative activists, the people who are actively involved in Republican politics.
And I think that there is a kind of—but for that matter, I also read this as somewhat... I mean, this is all happening now when Fuentes has been given this platform by Tucker Carlson. But Donald Trump had dinner with Fuentes in the White House—or at Mar-a-Lago, rather—a few years ago.
Sargent: You know, David, I was just about to bring that up, in fact. You know, if anything elevates Nick Fuentes, you would think that it’s the, you know, presumed next presidential nominee for the Republican Party hosting Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago. And I don’t really recall a big outcry at the time. So it’s really tough to take this kind of stuff about Tucker seriously as much as he deserves it. You know what I mean?
Austin Walsh: Well, I agree. But I also think that what I think is paramount here—and I talked to Curt Mills, who’s the publisher, or I think he’s the CEO, of The American Conservative magazine—for a story that I wrote for Boston Review two weeks ago about the sort of fissures in the MAGA coalition.
And one of the things Mills went on at length to me about was how Israel is a real fault line in right-wing politics in our contemporary moment, and that there is a tremendous amount of dissatisfaction with the kind of unconditional U.S. support for Israel among rank and [file]... even among evangelical Christians— younger evangelical Christians—who, you know, historically have been the kind of core base of Christian Zionism in this country.
And he told me that he thinks this is going to be the fault line on which the battle of succession for Trump—assuming he doesn’t run for a third term, which he’s constitutionally barred from, but we’ll see what happens—that this is going to be one of the major issues of the 2028 primary.
And I think we’re seeing that. I think that this is a sneak preview, in some ways, of that. I mean, one of the things we haven’t talked about yet is where J.D. Vance fits into all of this. Vance has been asked a series of questions by young conservatives about Israel and the United States—you know, I believe there was one recently about the Jewish persecution of Christians in Israel, something to that effect—and he punted on it.
I think because this is now a sizable faction in Republican politics and conservative politics that is beginning to exercise its muscles for the first time. And I think this is tied to—you know, there’s been so much focus on how Gaza has fractured the Democratic coalition and what that portends going forward in the Democratic Party—but this is also true among Republicans. And this is kind of the first instance of that we’re seeing.
Sargent: Well, let’s go a little broader there, because I think we really are looking at a preview of the struggle over the MAGA movement that’s going to erupt once Donald Trump is, you know, gone—presuming he will be gone.
I just don’t think there’s a figure like Trump who can manage these types of tensions in quite the way he can, because he is capable of going out there and being openly racist while also just flatly denying that he’s actually doing it. And he just kind of rolls over whoever’s in his path when they point out the contradiction.
There’s a weird talent there that I think someone like J.D. Vance lacks—this ability to be racist and pretend you’re not being racist. It’s a weird skill, isn’t it? And that’s where the struggle is gonna come in. And I think that’s where the anxiety you’re talking about comes in, right? The fear is that there actually is a very large body of people on the far right who want their standard-bearers to believe what Nick Fuentes does, right?
Austin Walsh: No, I think that’s right. I think—honestly, I think that one of the potential successors to Trump, you know, obviously Vance is well positioned because of his position in the White House. But I don’t think that he has the raw charisma of a Tucker Carlson.
I think Carlson is an underrated figure for the struggle for succession because he is, in a sense, better able to communicate these things. One of Fuentes’s real assets as a sort of political figure, as a media figure, is that he does kind of just sound like some guy from Chicago. If you actually just sit down and listen to him—especially with the suit-and-tie affect—he doesn’t come across as... he doesn’t immediately code as, you know, particularly extreme.
But when you actually listen to the substance of what he says, it’s like—my God.
Sargent: Well, let’s talk about the big story on the right going back half a century. I want to flag another quote from Washington Examiner contributor Brad Polumbo: ‘Fuentes won, he is mainstream now. The years-long effort which I participated in to gatekeep the antisemitic hateful freaks out of the Republican Party and conservative movement failed.’
So David, just going more broad than just the anti-Semitic angle there, that’s the bigger story on the modern right over the last 50 years, isn’t it? They keep wanting us to believe that there was this actual heroic effort to keep out the ‘hateful freaks,’ right? But then when you actually go through the history of the right, which you have done in your excellent book, you discover that the gatekeeping was not exactly as heroic as, you know, it’s been advertised since. Can you talk about that?
Austin Walsh: Yeah, you know, I mean, I think that a lot of this gatekeeping narrative has been—and is—very self-serving for the sort of modern conservative movement. It doesn’t really do justice to what was happening at the granular level, where you would have these moments in the history of the American conservative movement in the 1950s, for instance, when William F. Buckley, shortly after he founded National Review, was in this, you know, controversy over whether his authors—or the people who were on the masthead—could appear in the antisemitic American Mercury magazine.
And he hemmed and hawed for years before finally laying down the law and saying, We can’t do this. And even then, he maintained ties and friendships with some of the incredibly extreme figures—Revilo Oliver, most prominently—who was a classics professor at the University of Illinois. I write about him extensively in my book. He’s somebody who I think deserves his own biography one day. He’s one of the godfathers of the modern neo-Nazi movement, which evolves out of apostates to American conservatism. There’s a shared lineage there.
Pat Buchanan in the 1990s—there’s been a tremendous amount of debate recently among historians about whether or not we can call Pat Buchanan an antecedent to Donald Trump, or whether there’s any influence there. And I’m very much of the opinion that there is absolutely an antecedent there.
But one of the things about Pat Buchanan is that he is condemned across the American right in 1991 for making sort of antisemitic claims about Israeli control over U.S. foreign policy. In December—late December 1991—National Review magazine publishes this special issue, “In Search of Anti-Semitism,” which is turned into a book by Buckley, William F. Buckley, later the next year, in 1992. And John Ganz writes extensively about this in his book. But one of the things that I think people forget is that Buckley more or less endorses Pat Buchanan in the New Hampshire primary in 1992.
Now, he’s not saying he’s all aboard the Buchanan-brigade train. It’s very much a kind of tactical decision to register displeasure with the moderate administration of George H. W. Bush. But nevertheless, this is a guy who essentially says he’s an antisemite in his magazine in December and then, within two months, is endorsing him.
And so one of the reasons there has been this constant kind of ebb-and-flow tension on the American right is, on the one hand, the conservative movement has always wanted at least to have the narrative of a firm wall between the crazies and the responsible conservatives. But you also need the support of the crazies, the fringe, the kooks—not necessarily for electoral majorities, but in order to elect staff positions and whatnot.
This was the problem with Barry Goldwater in 1964. He needed the John Birch Society; he needed Birchers to volunteer for his campaign, to do door-knocking. I mean, he wasn’t gonna win anyway because of economic reasons, but it ended up crippling his campaign. But he needed it to be the nominee in the first place. And he didn’t dump the Birchers—Goldwater didn’t publicly criticize the Birchers—until October 1965, when he was no longer running for office.
Sargent: So looking ahead, J.D. Vance is the presumed nominee in 2028 for Republicans. How does he navigate this? I don’t think he has Nick Fuentes over to dinner at his house. And yet at the same time, he’s sort of very much in the camp of today’s MAGA Republicans who condemns globalism and that always tends to shade over into antisemitism, almost imperceptibly. And then you’re right in the Fuentes camp almost very quickly. How does how does Vance talk about this?
Austin Walsh: That’s a tough question. It’s a good question. And I don’t know. Vance has an issue when appealing to white nationalists. And let’s be very clear—I mean, what Fuentes represents is the white nationalist wing of the Republican Party, which is extensive. It’s a major force within internal Republican politics.
And Vance is married to an Indian American woman, and his children are mixed-race, and his wife is a practicing Hindu. And he has made indications, just in the past couple of weeks, that he’s attempting to sort of forestall or nullify that kind of criticism from the white nationalist right. He’s talked about how the religious nationalist right—he’s talked about how he hopes that his wife converts to Christianity, for instance.
I think that, you know, Vance is worth watching because he’s just—he’s an absolute political opportunist, doesn’t really believe in anything beyond his own sort of personal advancement. I think we’ve seen that throughout his career.
And, you know, I think that we’ll have a big clue about relative... and the other thing I will say about Vance is he’s not stupid. He knows how to play these different factions of the right off of each other. And so if he decides to embrace this kind of, like, white nationalist, Christian nationalist affect, it’s because he thinks it’s going to be necessary for him to win this struggle for succession. So he’s worth looking at very closely over the next couple of months.
Sargent: Well, you sure unpacked a lot there, man. You know, this wasn’t just some little rinky-dink feud over Tucker Carlson. This is the story of the American right and where it’s going, you know, in the post-Trump era, presuming there is one. David Austin Walsh, thanks so much for coming on, man. Always good to talk to you.
Austin Walsh: Thank you.