An explosive conversation between two influential personalities of the American far right: the white supremacist Nick Fuentes, Holocaust denier and Hitler admirer, and the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, host of the interview in the Maine cabin where he records his podcast- has sparked an internal war within the MAGA movement in recent days (Make America great again). It has been preparing for some time and brings to light the disagreements between the factions of Trumpism when it goes beyond the cult of its leader, the president of the United States.
The broadcast of the interview last week also caused a phenomenal crisis in one of the intellectual lungs of the right in Washington, the Heritage Foundation. It’s the think tank which has put in black and white in Project 2025 the agenda for a hypothetical return of Donald Trump to the White House, and which is fulfilling the letter.
Both Carlson and Kevin Roberts, director of Heritage, are accused by the MAGA universe of having covered up the extremist speech of Fuentes, a 27-year-old boy who records his podcastsa space that breaks all records for its pro-fascist, racist and misogynistic ideas, as well as for its diffusion of the creed of Christian nationalism and the wildest conspiracy theories.
Carlson received criticism for presenting a friendly interview and for allowing, true to his cynical style, his interlocutor to declare himself a “Stalin fan” without the journalist questioning that passion. Roberts, for his part, is paying the consequences of having intervened in defense of his “friend” Carlson at the beginning of the controversy. He has since reluctantly apologized, which did not prevent a revolt among the workers think tanks, which was created to provide intellectual cover for Ronald Reagan, fell into disuse with the passing of the years and the rise of Trump and regained it last year thanks to the 2025 Project.
Employees of his working group dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism resigned en masse, offended by their boss’s defense of Fuentes’ ideas, encouraged by Carlson, who during the interview used the term “Christian Zionists” to refer to the large group of conservatives who support Israel in the United States (he cited, among others, former President George W. Bush and Texas Senator Ted Cruz): “These are the people I hate the most.”
Because the conversation, which lasted more than two hours, hit the nail on the head when discussing US support for Israel in its brutal campaign in Gaza. It’s a debate that provokes an existential conflict in the MAGA universe, which is still trying to reconcile its support for Trump in everything he does and says, even in his unconditional support for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, with his passion for the ideal of America first (America First), a program incompatible with the financing of wars abroad.
Fuentes has a million followers on In his suspicions about the power of that black hand, he agrees with the presenter, who claimed without providing evidence that millionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad agent and insinuated that Israel was also present after the death of MAGA youth leader Charlie Kirk.
Plots to kill Charlie Kirk
Fuentes also dropped the fact that the murdered activist’s widow, Erika Kirk, participated in that plot to kill Kirk, which he had fiercely opposed for such space of influence. Candace Owens, another prominent voice in the MAGA world, also defended that Kirk was killed because he was about to change his mind and start criticizing Israel.
For him podcasters The interview with the Jew Ben Shapiro, another Trumpist leader – another in the ocean of disinformation in which the far right swims in the United States – is “worrying” for what it indicates about the “fragmentation of conservatism” in this country, “deliberately provoked by a dissident faction” led by Fuentes, as Shapiro explained this week referring to the groypersa split from the MAGA movement that identifies with the internet-famous meme of a frog.
“They are white supremacists. They hate women, Jews, Hindus, many types of Christians, people of color of different backgrounds, black people, American foreign policy, and the Constitution of the United States,” Shapiro listed as defining them in a podcasts monograph. “We are witnessing a process of normalization of groypers within the traditional Republican Party. “The main person responsible for this normalization is Tucker Carlson, an intellectual coward, a dishonest interlocutor and a terrible friend.”
Shapiro is not alone in fearing that Fuentes’ influence could increase MAGA’s standing around the world, especially among young people. “This is poison and I think we are facing an existential crisis in our party and in our country,” Sen. Ted Cruz said last week at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual summit.
Carlson was the highest-rated host on cable news. He went to podcasts after being fired from Fox News two years ago with coverage that ranged from Russian President Vladimir Putin to Iranian Masud Pezeshkian, to Alex Jones, convicted of spreading hoaxes about the massacre at a children’s school, or to historian Darryl Cooper ―according to Carlson, “the most important and honest in the United States”―, who, like Fuentes, denies the Holocaust and considers Winston Churchill the real villain of the Second World War. With all of them, Carlson dedicates himself to uncritically amplifying their discourses.
The journalist defends his style by resorting to freedom of expression and the rejection of cancel culture. And another MAGA contradiction emerges, a movement that has gained strength largely as a reaction to tech companies’ decision to ban them from their social networks for spreading pandemic hoaxes or election lies after Trump’s defeat. They don’t want to be confused with the censorious left, but Fuentes’ anti-Semitic ideas are simply too much for them.
