The GOP’s Effort To Rein In Bigotry Is Too Little Too Late

President Donald Trump stepped into a growing internal battle in the Republican Party on Monday, defending right-wing media figure Tucker Carlson from fellow conservatives angry that he had hosted Nick Fuentes, the openly fascist podcaster known for his racist, misogynist, pro-Hitler and antisemitic rants, for a softball interview.

“If he wants to [interview Fuentes], get the word out,” Trump said, while asserting he didn’t know who Fuentes is. “People have to decide.”

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The president actively entered the fray of an unfolding battle within the Republican Party, as the right wing struggles to deal with the rising influence of antisemitism and unvarnished bigotry against racial minorities and women in the conservative movement. On Oct. 27, Fuentes’ appearance on Carlson’s online show launched the ongoing row into high gear: Fuentes was given a platform on one of the most important online shows in the conservative ecosystem where he could declare that “the main challenge” of American society is “organized Jewry.”

“We do need to be right-wing. We do need to be Christian. We do, on some level, need to be pro-white,” Fuentes said. “Not to the exclusion of everybody else, but recognizing that white people have a special heritage here, as Americans.”

In the weeks since, the conservative sphere has been pulled apart by the question of whether Fuentes should be welcomed or rejected. Conservative media figures are targeting each other, while tony think tanks melt down amid internal criticism and mass resignations.

The biggest resignation came on Monday as Robert P. George, a Princeton University legal scholar and religious right leader, resigned from the board of the Heritage Foundation, the most prominent conservative think tank in Washington. In a statement, he directly attributed his decision to Heritage President Kevin Roberts’ initial defense of Carlson for hosting Fuentes.

“I could not remain without a full retraction of the video released by Kevin Roberts, speaking for and in the name of Heritage, on October 30th,” George said in a Facebook post. “Although Kevin publicly apologized for some of what he said in the video, he could not offer a full retraction of its content. So, we reached an impasse.”

This kind of schism on the right has occurred repeatedly since Trump took over the party. This version, however, is unlike any other previous wave of discontent that has roiled the party in the Trump era.

Now, Republicans are left with a dilemma: How to, or whether at this point they even can, separate themselves from the open bigotry and antisemitism increasingly permeating right-wing politics?

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In the years since he rose to prominence, Trump’s political style has challenged all norms of what is off-limits in political discourse. In his first campaign and term in office, he called Mexicans “rapists” and “murderers,” attacked judges solely for their ethnicity, called African countries “shitholes” and regularly demeaned women. And of course, his reaction to the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which featured white supremacist and antisemitic iconography, and was preceded by a white nationalist march with marchers chanting “Jews will not replace us.”

It has seen pushback. First, the Never Trumpers, led by prominent neoconservatives, fled the party beginning in 2016, along with a rump group of moderates. Trump’s refusal to draw a line on radicalism to his right led to further defections over time. But none of these efforts to restrain the party from opening its doors to its most radical and bigoted elements has worked. Those attempting a cordon sanitaire in the interest of protecting the mainstream movement have instead found themselves on the outside looking in.

The most recent phase began when a lone gunman in Utah killed conservative activist Charlie Kirk in mid-September. In the aftermath, the right wing sought to use the assassination to galvanize the right for the battle it imagined it must wage against its political enemies. It was “like a domestic 9/11,” as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent put it, with all the accompanying subtext.

But instead of rallying the right together, Kirk’s death left a vacuum and opened the door to the conservative movement’s most hard-right and openly fascist actors to seize their moment. The conspiracism that has served as the fuel for Trump’s political ascent suddenly turned against the one target that Republicans had tried to keep insulated: Israel.

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Before his murder, Kirk had reportedly started to privately reconsider the GOP’s pro-Israel stance. Donors like the New York billionaire Bill Ackman, who is Jewish, tried to push Kirk to remain steadfast in his support of Israel in a hastily organized intervention. But Kirk was not alone. Many in the right-wing media ecosystem had begun to cater to young conservatives — many of whom increasingly view Israel negatively.

Support for Israel is one of the few issues where the elected members of both parties find common ground. Republicans, while never drawing more than 40% of the Jewish vote, see support for Israel as important for maintaining a key ally in the Middle East and for keeping their evangelical base, which has a religious interest in Israel, happy. Few, if any, elected Republicans dare to break with Israel even as the sands of public opinion shift underneath them. However, there are significant elements of each ideological wing that disagree with U.S. support for Israel. On the left, that manifests as opposition to the country’s Zionist politics and an anti-interventionist strain opposed to U.S. military involvement in the Middle East. That same anti-interventionist strain exists on the right, but increasingly the growing opposition to Israel on the right is manifesting as plain old antisemitism — the real kind, not the accusations of antisemitism used to smear many pro-Palestinian activists.

Fuentes, whose show “America First” has over 500,000 followers on the right-wing video platform Rumble, has been in attendance at all of the big events of the Trump era, from the Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville to rallying the crowds ahead of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. He had also long challenged Kirk as the voice of young conservatives: His supporters, known as groypers, had heckled Kirk’s public appearances in the past.

While radical, Fuentes’ statements on Carlson’s show were toned down from his usual fare. He did not tell Carlson, “I’m just like Hitler,” or “I don’t believe in the Holocaust,” as he has in the past. Nor did he use slurs to refer to Vice President JD Vance’s wife, Usha Vance, as he consistently does on his own show. And he didn’t sum up his worldview, as he has done in the past, saying, “Jews are running society, women need to shut the fuck up, Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part, and we would live in paradise.” In spite of, or perhaps because of the growing acceptance of these kinds of comments, Fuentes has seen his reach in conservative media grow over the past year — particularly since Kirk’s death.

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Moving away from a pro-Israel stance served as a way for right-wing media figures and conservative institutions to co-opt Fuentes’ growing influence with that branch of young conservatism, without letting him into the conservative tent. Kirk had been co-opting Fuentes’ extremism in recent years amid attacks from Fuentes’ supporters by increasingly voicing a slightly more muted version of Fuentes’ racism and misogyny, as Fuentes himself noted.

“Six years ago, they said it was racist to say that we should have a whites-only immigration policy,” Fuentes said about Kirk and another conservative podcaster, Matt Walsh, in June, adding, “Here we are in 2025, both of them say no more nonwhites, no more third-worlders, deport them all.”

What Kirk did not take from Fuentes was open antisemitism. Others, however, stepped in to reach out to the marketplace that Fuentes revealed.

Right-wing podcaster Candace Owens had already adopted this open antisemitism, blaming Jews for the death of Jesus (the original antisemitic trope) plus all of modern life’s perceived ills, including feminism, socialism, psychology, gambling, drug addiction and pornography, before she revealed Kirk’s text messages showing he was leaning away from a pro-Israel position 48 hours before he was killed. The implication behind this is that Kirk’s potential embrace of anti-Israel views was somehow connected to his assassination, for which there is no evidence.

Kirk’s assassination let the right’s antisemitic wing out of the bottle. Fuentes and his ilk filled the vacuum, as the online right publicly veered into the kind of old-fashioned and blatant antisemitism that the conservative movement had tried to keep under wraps for generations.

Some conservatives, largely Jewish Republicans and those with pro-Israel politics, have revolted, including the leaders of the Republican Jewish Coalition, media star Ben Shapiro, radio host Mark Levin, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and others, stating that Fuentes should have no place in the conservative movement. Others, however, sought to defend Carlson and appeal to Fuentes and his growing supporters among young conservatives.

“I am appalled, offended and disgusted that [Roberts] and Heritage would stand with Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes as somehow being acceptable spokespeople within the conservative movement,” Matt Brooks, CEO of the Republican Jewish Coalition, told Jewish Insider on Oct. 30.

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“A group of white supremacists known as the ‘groypers’ is maliciously attempting to subvert the conservative movement,” conservative media figure Shapiro wrote in a letter to the Wall Street Journal on Nov. 4. “The main agent of their normalization within the GOP is Tucker Carlson, who is now being aided and celebrated by one of the key organizations of the traditional right, the Heritage Foundation.”

The fallout from Fuentes’ appearance on Carlson’s show expanded after Roberts, the Heritage Foundation president, came out in defense of Carlson platforming Fuentes by decrying a “venomous coalition” of “globalists” — a word widely understood as an antisemitic dogwhistle — out to get him.

Roberts’ unprompted statement roiled The Heritage Foundation, with numerous resignations and the departure of its associated antisemitism task force. At a contentious all-staff meeting, Roberts apologized by stating he hadn’t reviewed the statement he read and pleaded ignorance about Fuentes, claiming he, the head of the most prominent conservative think tank in America, didn’t “consume a lot of news.” During that meeting, multiple longtime Heritage employees denounced Roberts’ statement, arguing he had betrayed the conservative movement and acted out of cowardice.

Nor was Heritage the only conservative monolith to face such blowback. In a Nov. 10 “Open Letter to the Conservative Movement,” two former leaders of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a conservative campus organization founded by William F. Buckley in 1953, wrote that the crack-up at Heritage “points to how Conservatism’s venerable institutions have been infiltrated and quietly taken over by a tight-knit, fringe group of post-liberal thinkers who believe America has been ‘off the rails’ since the Founding.”

The letter from former ISI president Christopher Long and former ISI chairman Thomas Lynch decried the organization’s platforming of neo-reactionary monarchist Curtis Yarvin and post-liberal intellectual Patrick Deneen on a new podcast show.

“Rather than peeling away disaffected young males who flock to the noxious ideas of Fuentes and Yarvin, ISI’s Project Cosmos fawns over their anti-liberal philosophies,” Long and Lynch wrote.

But this effort to block out the post-liberal, fascist, racist, and antisemitic factions of the right has come too little, too late.

Trump’s first term featured the president flirting with turning a blind eye to white nationalists and antisemites with phrases like “very fine people.” His second term has ramped up into a full-blown ethnonationalist policy that admits only whites as refugees, seeks to purge Black people from universities and the military, and runs a police state targeting people for deportation based on racial profiling.

Most importantly, Trump and Carlson have embraced the “great replacement” theory that “they” are trying to replace the whites in the U.S. by opening borders to non-European people. Often, the person blamed for this is billionaire investor and left-wing donor George Soros, who is Jewish. Soros serves as a stand-in symbol to echo and elide the origins of this theory, which emerged from neo-Nazi literature on “white genocide” that directly implicates Jews as the group behind the “great replacement.” It is not a far leap then for young conservatives raised on Trump’s conspiracism to move beyond Trump or Carlson’s vague insinuations of who is behind the “great replacement” to latch onto Fuentes’ more explicit claim that there is a specific group to blame: the Jews.

It’s not like Trump has not catered to Fuentes or his supporters. In fact, Trump hosted Fuentes and the pro-Nazi rapper Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago in 2022. Trump later claimed he did not know who Fuentes was.

Fuentes supporters and fellow travellers who express similar racist, misogynist and antisemitic positions, however, appear to populate Trump’s second administration. (A particular irony, given how the administration has used allegations of antisemitism to attack other institutions.)

Paul Ingrassia, a White House lawyer, saw his nomination to head the Office of Special Counsel derailed after text messages revealed he said he had a “Nazi streak,” and that he used Italian-American slurs for Black people while calling for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday to be “tossed into the seventh circle of hell.” Ingrassia was not fired from the White House. Instead, he was appointed as deputy counsel of the General Services Administration. Ingrassia told GOP senators he couldn’t remember sending the texts, while Ingrassia’s lawyer claimed the texts could have been doctored, despite no evidence that they were faked.

Notably, Ingrassia has also expressed support for Fuentes. He called in 2024 for Kirk’s Turning Point USA to revoke its ban on Fuentes and for X to reinstate Fuentes after he was banned. Fuentes’ X account was later reinstated. Ingrassia also attended a rally in Detroit where Fuentes led the crowd in a chant of “Fuck off Jew!” (Ingrassia told The Intercept that he was at the rally by chance.)

Support for Fuentes is seen as widespread among young conservatives in Washington. The right-wing essayist Rod Dreher wrote recently that a “DC insider” told him that “between 30 and 40 percent” of Gen Z conservatives working in Washington are “fans of Nick Fuentes.” This estimate was “confirmed multiple times by Zoomers who live in that world,” he wrote after talking to GOP staffers in Washington.

“There’s groypers in government, there’s groypers in every department, every agency, OK?” Fuentes boasted on his podcast on Oct. 14.

In voicing opposition to Fuentes’ invitation into the tent by Carlson, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) declared himself part of the “Hitler sucks wing” of the party, implying that the party has a “Hitler doesn’t suck” wing.

The barbarians aren’t at the gates. They’re already in the White House.

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