Donald Trump and maga Republicans must reject evilism spewed by Tucker Carlson and antisemite Nick Fuentes

"Tucker Carlson is fog," writes John Mac Ghlionn in this interesting political analysis published in the Boston Globe.

John Mac Ghlionn contributes regularly to US News & World Report, Spectator World, and The Hill.

Tucker Carlson recently chose to interview the evil Nazi

Nick Fuentes, a man loathed by most of the American left and by a substantial share of the American right. Fuentes is widely understood, across ideological lines, as toxic. 

Fuentes has spoken admiringly of figures like💢 Hitler and Stalin, flirted openly with antisemitic ✡️conspiracy theories, rejected the legitimacy of liberal democracy, argued that women shouldn’t have the right to vote, and spoken approvingly of political violence and ethnic nationalism. None of this is ambiguous. None of it requires interpretation. Fuentes has said disgraceful things. Full stop.💢❗

But, politically speaking, the evil Fuentes is a much easier problem for Republicans to handle than Carlson is. 

Fuentes is an threatening evil flare 🔥in the night sky. 

Evil, crude, and easy to track. Everyone knows where he stands. He doesn’t pretend to be a loyal party man. He has withheld support when it suited him, including refusing to back Trump in 2024. He attacks Trump directly, in plain language, without deflecting blame onto lower-level figures.

So, it allows the maga Republicans to say, “That’s not us,” 🤥and (sort of❓) mean it.🙄 Fuentes functions, in this sense, as a kind of ideological quarantine zone. He is visible, legible, and — crucially — containable.  (Except that Fuentes continues to attract attention making him dangerous. "Evil is as evil does". His evilism is like an evil magnet that catches metal nails.) 

Carlson is weirdly different. Not because he is “worse” in the moral-ranking sense people enjoy arguing about online, but because he is more structurally dangerous to the GOP. 

Fuentes is outside the house, shouting. Carlson is inside the house, rearranging furniture, insisting he is only “asking questions” while he does it.

Before going further, I should be explicit about where this criticism comes from.

I write this as a conservative who regularly watches Carlson — his YouTube clips, his long-form interviews, his podcasts. This is not the view of a drive-by critic or a partisan adversary. It comes from sustained exposure. And that exposure has become increasingly frustrating. 

Carlson says one thing and then does another. (Ugh❗ "who  knew"❓) He gestures toward restraint and then indulges provocation. He flirts with accountability and then retreats into ambiguity. When viewers notice the contradiction, he waves it away — cackles, shrugs, insists they’re imagining things. What he sells as misunderstanding is, in fact, gaslighting, and any attentive viewer can see it.👀

There’s an old principle here. The better enemy is often the one you can see. The threat you can name. The real trouble is the fog that rolls in quietly and convinces you it’s just “weather.”

Carlson is fog.

He is the kind of “dissident” who wants insider access and outsider swagger, Establishment proximity and anti-Establishment theatrics. He throws stones from behind the wall and then acts surprised when people notice his name etched into them.

This isn’t an abstract concern. In late December, more than a dozen senior staffers left the Heritage Foundation to join a new group founded by former vice president Mike Pence. Their exit followed internal turmoil sparked by the growing influence of right-wing media figures pushing antisemitic and extremist narratives. Carlson became a central flashpoint because he occupies a uniquely powerful position within conservative media — powerful enough to force institutions to choose sides.

The rupture was not really about Carlson alone. It was about what he represented, and what defending — or refusing to defend — him signaled. Editors, donors, board members, and allied organizations faced an uncomfortable choice: Was Carlson still an asset to be shielded or a liability to be contained? The fracture followed those answers. Some closed ranks around him, viewing criticism as Establishment overreach. Others stepped back from him, driven less by ideological disagreement than by their instinct for institutional survival.

The Heritage Foundation bombshell came shortly after Turning Point USA’s annual youth conference — intended as a unifying celebration honoring Charlie Kirk — devolved into a public brawl over the future of Trump’s movement. Ben Shapiro used the stage to deliver a scathing attack on Carlson and his allies, calling them “grifters and charlatans” trafficking in conspiracy theories and falsehoods. 

Carlson took the stage soon after and fired back, escalating the confrontation before thousands of young conservative activists. That moment mattered because it revealed real fault lines in the conservative coalition. Internal division creates opportunity, especially for figures like Carlson, who thrive on provocation and plausible deniability.

The pattern was evident in Carlson’s recent trip to Qatar, when he headlined the Doha Forum, interviewed Qatar’s prime minister, and then announced he was buying property in Qatar “to make a statement,” insisting he’s “an American and a free man” who will live wherever he wants. That’s a remarkable posture for a man whose brand is built on warning Americans about hostile ideologies, foreign money, and the slow-motion sabotage of the West.

Qatar is not some harmless foreign backdrop for a trolling gesture. Rather, Qatar is a hostile regime that has long operated as a banker, broker, and diplomatic shield for Islamist terror networks, including Hamas and Hezbollah. It hosts Hamas’s political leadership, funds aligned groups, and functions as a key back channel in conflicts that have spilled Western blood. Whatever one thinks about Israel, Gaza, or Middle Eastern politics more broadly, Qatar sits at the center of the reality being ignored.

The problem becomes clearer in Carlson’s treatment of Israel and Jews. This is not a defense of Israel or of Christian Zionism, both of which are legitimate subjects for debate and criticism. The issue is Carlson’s insistence on having it both ways. He regularly says he “likes Israel” even as he repeatedly singles it out for scorn, derides Christian Zionism, and peppers his commentary with remarks about Jews that are clearly designed to provoke. 

In the eulogy for Charlie Kirk, Carlson likened Kirk to Jesus and invoked shadowy “people in power” conspiring in lamplit rooms, “eating hummus,” to silence truth-tellers. 

The implication was unambiguous, even if it went unnamed. When challenged, Carlson retreats behind the claim that he isn’t antisemitic  ✡️. It’s a familiar routine: push the line, gauge the reaction, deny intent.

Fuentes, by contrast, dispenses with pretense. He calls himself an antisemite ✡️ and means it. 🤢 His views are abhorrent, 💢but they are unmistakable. He doesn’t hide behind irony or implication. Republicans don’t have to guess where he stands. With Carlson, they are invited to 

pretend there is nothing to see. This is why Fuentes is useful as a foil and why Carlson is the real bellwether. The test isn’t whether conservatives denounce a 27-year-old shock merchant. That part is easy. The real test is whether conservatives will confront Carlson’s far more consequential pattern of deception and evasion.

This is what makes Carlson dangerous in a way Fuentes isn’t. Fuentes doesn’t have institutional leverage. He can’t tilt committee staffers. He can’t normalize a new foreign-policy fashion among influencers who actually shape the party’s mood. He can’t blur the line between “America First” and “Qatar First” while still being treated, by many, as a serious man.

Tucker Carlson can. He has a second kind of leverage, too: family adjacency to real power. His son, Buckley, works for Vice President JD Vance.

That doesn’t mean Carlson dictates policy through his son. It means Carlson’s ecosystem overlaps with the governing ecosystem. The “outsider” is not outside. He is in the wiring. He is close enough to touch the current.

And what does Carlson do with that position? He almost never fires cleanly at the top. He rarely, if ever, says “Trump is wrong, and here is why.” Instead, he attacks the perimeter: appointees, advisers, agencies, “neocons,” “globalists,” nameless operators — anyone who can be blamed without forcing a direct break with the one man whose coalition he still wants to influence.

It’s how you remain “inside” and “against” at the same time. It’s how you get to market yourself as a martyr while still dining at court.

I have grown disillusioned with the right — fed up with evasions, with the Epstein nonanswers, with the reflexive closing of ranks whenever accountability might cost something. This isn’t the opposition talking; it’s disappointment from someone who once believed Trump could actually Make America Great Again. I was wrong. The second term has been more erratic, not less. The promised draining of the swamp never happened; power simply reorganized itself. Tucker Carlson didn’t oppose the marshy makeover. He learned how to thrive within it. And that is why he poses a greater danger to Republicans than Fuentes.

Liberals may be tempted to dismiss this as a family quarrel on the right. That is a mistake. Trump is already a volatile leader, and he still has three years left in office. Internal divisions within his coalition are widening, not narrowing. As Trump's political opposition pressure mounts, he lashes out more frequently, targets more erratically, and governs more impulsively.

Republicans will not win in the midterms in 2026 — and continue to govern after 2028 — when they  continue to blindly support Donald Trump like lemmings heading off a cliff.  Fuentes is an evil marginal figure who is easy to reject, but Carlson is ambitious, he aspires to be a powerful media figure who presents himself as a truth-teller while slowly expanding what the wrongminded Republican party is willing to accept, excuse, and blindly defend.