on tucker carlson, nick fuentes, the heritage foundation, and all that

If you had asked me in 2016 whether I thought I’d write a blog about the Heritage Foundation defending a former Fox News host after he hosted a friendly conversation with one of the country’s leading white nationalists, I’d probably ask if you were drunk. But it’s 2025, and here we are: Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, wants you to know that his organization didn’t “become the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement by canceling our own people.” He wants you to “[j]oin us—not to cancel—but to guide, challenge, and strengthen the conversation.” 

Just to backtrack for anyone reading this that isn't up on the news: Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist and antisemite, joined Tucker Carlson on his livestreaming show. Fuentes—who has said various things like "Hitler had aura," dreamed of eras where women were "burned at the stake," and called for his followers to pledge to "rape, kill, and die" for him—has long been considered a marginal figure to such an extent that Carlson previously brushed him off as a "weird little gay kid." The episode aired last week on X and Carlson's livestreaming site.

There’s plenty of hypocrisy to point out here. For one, Heritage is the author of Project Esther, a guidebook for cracking down left-wing anti-Zionist student protesters on college and university campuses. One of its top priorities is to “expose the critical resources fueling antisemitism” through what it dubs the “Hamas Support Network.” 

But that’s not what I want to focus on here. Instead, I want to explore the question that has been nagging me since I first learned of Fuentes’ appearance on Tucker Carlson: How did we get here? And, in the long term, what does it mean? 

Fuentes would, if his appearance on Carlson’s show is any indication, like you to see him as a victim. Over the course of the first hour, Fuentes explains to Carlson a version of his life story that envisions powerful forces coming together at each step of the way to crush him. He claims that Media Matters, a left-leaning nonprofit that monitors conservative media, worked with the Daily Wire to smear him. He complains that the Leadership Institute, an incubator for young right-wing activists, didn’t hire him. He whines that politicians, including former Republican candidate Joe Kent and congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, for distancing themselves from him in public. He talks about being put on a no-fly list.* At every step of the way throughout his career, it seems, someone was conspiring against Fuentes. Carlson just nods along, with little pushback.

As someone who has been following Fuentes’ career for well over half a decade, what struck me about this is how picture-perfect this victimization story was—and how seemingly eager Carlson was to nudge Fuentes along. At every step of the way, Fuentes portrays himself as a wrongly maligned patriot who was excised from mainstream politics for reasons unknown. He doorknocked for Ted Cruz and listened to Mark Levin. He wanted Kent to succeed, but then Kent disavowed him. 

But his exchange with Carlson over his attempt to get a job at the Leadership Institute is particularly telling. In it, Fuentes explains why he believes he didn’t get the job:

FUENTES: It was a field representative job. I went out for a job training at the end of July 2017…. I go there, and on the first day of the whole thing, they go around the room of all the prospective applicants. It’s like a big tryout, basically, for two weeks. And they want to get everybody to break the ice and get to know each other. So we did introductions. They said: “Say your name, how old you are, and why you’re a conservative.” … And they get to me, and I said: “Well, I’m a conservative because we’re losing our civilization because of mass immigration. America doesn’t resemble America anymore. France is no longer France… And if we don’t conserve the demographics, forget about the rest. That’s what we need to conserve.” I said that. I was told later on that, at that moment, I was immediately disqualified by the people that were running the job training.

TUCKER: On what grounds? 

FUENTES: I said that was too far right. That was too extreme. 

TUCKER: Worrying about who lives in your country is “far right”?

FUENTES: Apparently. 

This may very well be true. The Leadership Institute is an incubator for mainstream rightwing activists to build their careers in politics. It’s also where numerous white nationalists, particularly those from the so-called “alt-right,” started their careers. Kevin DeAnna, a white nationalist who went by “James Kirkpatrick” and “Gregory Hood” until I outed him five years ago, has spoken at Fuentes’ events and previously served as a field representative at LI. While there, he launched a proto-alt-right organization. Another LI graduate, Matthew Heimbach, went on to become one of the main organizers behind the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in 2017—where Klansmen, neo-Nazis, and other white supremacists led violent demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia, resulting in the death of an antiracist activist. Given all that, it’s unsurprising that LI might screen for someone whose rhetoric sounded too close to what was then the alt-right.

Carlson’s feigned surprise bolsters the two-pronged argument that Fuentes seems to be making in these recent retellings of his career. First, since Fuentes was a college student, powerful forces have aligned to keep him out of the conservative mainstream… for some reason. Second, because the right’s rhetoric has shifted so far into white nationalism, Fuentes should be entitled to the opportunities he never had. 

The problem is, well, in a hierarchical right-wing worldview, you shouldn’t be actually entitled to jackshit. What is this, a welfare program for attention? Furthermore, it’s a simplistic, made-in-a-lab-to-mainstream-the-guy narrative that misrepresents how close his relationship is to mainstream Republicans.

Since launching his career through the conservative livestreaming platform Right Side Broadcasting Network in early 2017, Fuentes has always had some kind of mutual, albeit sometimes complicated and fraught, relationship with the mainstream right. He’s dined with Trump, brought his followers to “Stop the Steal” rallies in 2020 and 2021, hosted national politicians at his events, and met with powerful Republican donors. His goal, for well over half a decade, has been to work within the political system to build “the right-wing flank of the Republican Party.” 

To do this, Fuentes encouraged his followers to disrupt events on university campuses hosted by more mainstream Republican groups, such as Turning Point USA. Online, his followers—known as “groypers”—berated other Republican activists for being insufficiently racist, antisemitic, or misogynistic. 

But, as Amanda Moore, Ben Lorber, and others—including myself—have documented, this was only part of Fuentes’ strategy. “Groypers” or Fuentes fans of some kind have found their way into Turning Point USA, state and federal legislative offices, various other Republican youth organizations, popular livestreaming shows, and even the Trump administration. Current and former lawmakers have spoken at or attended his events. He dined with Trump. He’s met with major Republican donors. 

In his own livestream, Fuentes’ relationship with the mainstream right is totally different than what he presents to mainstream listeners. The groypers have “won,” he said in June. “My ideas are already there. I’ve already impregnated your organization,” he said in a monologue directed to TPUSA head Charlie Kirk in August, roughly two weeks before his assassination. “I took Turning Point USA, and I fucked it.” 

Given all this, the victimization strategy seems deliberate. The right is obsessed with so-called “cancel culture.” (Apparently I’m a practitioner, though I think of myself as more of an investigative reporter.) What Carlson, and perhaps to a lesser extent Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation, seem to be implying here: Even if people don’t like you for good reasons, the fact that the right people don’t like you is enough to propel your career into overdrive. 

Since Roberts’ video on X, some Heritage Foundation affiliates have come together to publicly criticize his portrayal of Carlson and Fuentes. Yesterday, the National Review reported that Roberts’ chief of staff, Ryan Neuhaus, had been reassigned. Prominent allies of the organization, including the Republican Jewish Committee, expressed deep disapproval with Roberts’ rhetoric. I think my personal favorite was Mitch McConnell publicly dunking on him. The various spats prompted Roberts to release a statement on X on October 31, where he explains what he finds personally odious about Fuentes. Then, he proceeds to say that he sees his job as “not to cancel—but to guide, challenge, and strengthen the conversation.” 

What this means for the future of the Heritage Foundation is above the paygrade of this newsletter, since I don’t report for free. But with regards to the broader right, I have two theories. 

First off, someone seems like they want Fuentes to stay. I don’t think the Trump administration would give someone like Fuentes a job, but like Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, Jack Posobiec, Candace Owens, Andrew Tate, Laura Loomer, and others, I do think there’s a part of the movement that’s willing to indulge him—and possibly dump money on him—as long as he toes the line. Based on Fuentes’ recent media appearances, it seems that he’s more than willing to shift his position from a Richard Spencer-style disdain for the Republican Party and instead would encourage his followers to vote for Republicans when needed. Less than a year after encouraging his followers to not vote in the 2024 election, he’s already pivoted, actually. In an October appearance on Infowars, Fuentes said: “A Republican must win in ‘28, whoever it is.” Fuentes has repeatedly condemned J.D. Vance, Trump’s presumed successor, so he seems to be signaling he’s willing to change that position.

If Jones, Loomer, Carlson, Tate, Owens, and the vast number of eternally irritating influencers that orbit Trump are any indication, that agreement—vote Republican, no matter what—seems to be the ticket to saying whatever dumb shit they want. Public Hitler salutes and praise for his “aura” might be too edgy, but if you want to terrorize the families of schoolchildren murdered in mass shootings, as Alex Jones did, then—fine! You’re still MAGA at the end of the day. 

Second, even though the administration has claimed it cares about the antisemitism that Fuentes spews, there really is no way out for the movement. The pro-Trump right got itself here. You can call this whatever you want. John Ganz has called it “groyperfication.” I’ve argued that the shifting rhetoric on the right toward more overtly white nationalist positions is a sign that the alt-right “won.” 

This isn’t just an observation from the left. Richard Hanania, who would know about this milieu, argued in UnHerd over the weekend that influencers were adopting “Fuentes-Lite positions on issues like immigration and vaccines.”

The right is in a tough spot with regards to Fuentes’ criticisms of Israel, which are rooted in a deep antisemitism. But even there, the right seems unable to shift its younger demographics’ views on Israel and antisemitism. It can’t shift toward the position that most leftwing anti-Zionists take, such as myself, which is rooted in a suspicion and dislike of ethnonationalism writ large. After all, the left, as rightwing activists have said for years, needs to be “crushed.”

The right wanted to say “no enemies to the right.” After Kirk’s death, it wanted to “unite” around the urgent need to “crush the left.” It made its bed. Now it has to sleep in it. 

*This is kind of a long story, but per court documents, the list he appeared to be on was related to a tweet he did threatening airline workers.