: [POST-BROADCAST CLARIFICATION Nov. 10, 2025: The Jewish Council for Public Affairs is a nonpartisan organization.]
AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Ayesha Rascoe. Good morning. There's been fallout from right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson's long and friendly interview with far-right influencer Nick Fuentes last week.
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TUCKER CARLSON: Nick Fuentes, thank you for doing this.
NICK FUENTES: Yeah, thank you for having me.
CARLSON: I've wanted to meet you. I've heard about you.
FUENTES: I've heard about you, so...
CARLSON: Well, thank you.
RASCOE: Fuentes has built an online following promoting many white nationalist and extremist ideas, including Holocaust denial. He's also used violent and degrading rhetoric about women. And a heads up - you'll hear an example of that in this story. As NPR's Sarah McCammon reports, prominent conservatives are now wrestling with how to respond to antisemitism in their ranks.
SARAH MCCAMMON, BYLINE: Nick Fuentes has suggested that a lot of women want to be raped, claimed that Jim Crow segregation laws were better for Black Americans and expressed admiration for Hitler, among other things. Those kinds of statements have mostly kept Fuentes on the fringes of the conservative movement. But in an episode of "The Tucker Carlson Show" published on October 27, Carlson sat down with Fuentes for a friendly conversation that lasted more than two hours. In one exchange, Fuentes invoked an old antisemitic trope, suggesting that Jewish loyalty to Israel and other Jews is standing in the way of a unified American society.
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FUENTES: I would say, though, that the main challenge to that, a big challenge to that is organized Jewry in America. I don't think...
MCCAMMON: Fuentes then listed several influential Jewish Americans that he claimed were not capable of fostering national unity.
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FUENTES: I see Jewishness as the common denominator. And you're right...
MCCAMMON: Within days, the interview sparked a backlash among some on the right.
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LINDSEY GRAHAM: But I just want to make it really clear, I'm in the Hitler-sucks wing of the Republican Party (laughter).
MCCAMMON: That's South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham at the Republican Jewish Coalition meeting in Las Vegas last weekend, where several speakers called out rising antisemitism. But another prominent conservative, Kevin Roberts, the head of the influential think tank The Heritage Foundation, defended Tucker Carlson.
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KEVIN ROBERTS: Who remains, and as I have said before, always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation - the venomous coalition attacking him are sowing division. Their attempt to cancel him will fail.
MCCAMMON: In that video, posted to X on October 30, Roberts also said conservatives should feel free to critique Israel despite pressure from what he described as the globalist class. That sparked backlash from some Heritage staff and allies, including Rabbi Yaakov Menken, with the Coalition for Jewish Values.
YAAKOV MENKEN: Obviously, if you want to deride the U.N. as a collection of globalists, that's fine. But if you want to refer to unnamed globalists protesting against antisemitism, hmm, who do I imagine that's talking about?
MCCAMMON: Menken was part of a task force Heritage convened to fight antisemitism. Several members, including Menken's organization, ultimately stepped down from the task force in response to Roberts' handling of the situation. On Wednesday, Roberts met with Heritage staff to address the ongoing fallout.
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ROBERTS: I didn't know much about this Fuentes guy. I still don't, which underscores the mistake.
MCCAMMON: In a video of the meeting published online, senior research fellow Robert Rector said conservatives should learn lessons from when the movement pushed out some of its most extreme voices.
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ROBERT RECTOR: You say, oh, we don't cancel. We do cancel. Did we cancel David Duke? Yes. Did we cancel the John Birch Society? Yes - OK? - because they were harmful because if they're in your movement, you look like clowns.
MCCAMMON: Rector said he was disturbed both by what he heard from Fuentes and by what he described as Tucker Carlson's failure to ask probing questions. Roberts responded to concerns from Rector and others with this.
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ROBERTS: That evil person, Fuentes - although I still have hope for his soul - has an audience of several million people, and at least some of that audience might be open to be converted.
MCCAMMON: That evening, Roberts released another video statement, apologizing for his earlier choice of words and also referring to, quote, "my friend, Tucker Carlson." Shortly after, leaders of the antisemitism task force announced they were disaffiliating from Heritage.
For his part, Carlson sat down for an interview Thursday with Megyn Kelly, another former Fox News host turned podcaster. Kelly rattled off what she described as a long list of very vile past statements from Fuentes.
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MEGYN KELLY: So what do you say to those people saying, why didn't you raise any of that?
CARLSON: You know, do your own interview the way that you want to do it. You're not my editor. Buzz off. I mean, I don't know. You want to go yell at Nick Fuentes, I'll give you his cell. Call him.
RASCOE: We're now going to bring back in Sarah McCammon. You laid out what's happened in the last couple of weeks. But this isn't the first time that Republicans have had this fight, right?
MCCAMMON: Right. President Trump's critics point to a long history of actions and statements that they say have encouraged extremists, like three years ago, when, after facing blowback for dining with Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, Trump said on Truth Social that he didn't know Fuentes before hosting him. More recently, Trump's choice of a nominee for the Office of Special Counsel, who had a history of sending white supremacist texts, also caused concern. That nominee withdrew. And, Ayesha, this comes after a scandal involving antisemitic and racist messages exchanged by some Young Republicans.
RASCOE: This is all happening at a time when there are rising reports of antisemitic incidents and violence. What are you hearing from Jewish leaders about how this fits into that larger pattern?
MCCAMMON: There is a lot of concern about what they're hearing across the political spectrum. But when it comes to Trump, Sam Markstein, with the Republican Jewish Coalition, pointed to his support for Israel and described Trump as the best friend that the Jewish community has ever had in the White House. Now, Amy Spitalnick at the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, which is a progressive group, says this is coming to a head on the right because the optics are just so bad.
AMY SPITALNICK: I appreciate the voices who are speaking out right now, but it needs to go hand in hand with the moral clarity and courage to name this normalization of antisemitism wherever it exists within their own party, just as each of us have an obligation to do it in whatever spaces and political arenas we operate in.
MCCAMMON: And she says she's concerned about antisemitism across the political spectrum. And if conservatives are truly committed to stamping it out within their ranks, she says they need to hold their movement accountable for the people that they put in leadership.
RASCOE: That's NPR's Sarah McCammon. Thank you so much.
MCCAMMON: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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