TJ Walker argues the Heritage Foundation crossed a line by defending Tucker Carlson's interview with Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. He contrasts this with William F. Buckley's mid-20th-century effort to keep antisemites out of respectable conservatism, saying platforming such figures normalizes hate and damages conservative credibility.
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Heritage's line in the sand over Nick Fuentes. The Heritage foundation president Kevin Roberts publicly backed Tucker Carlson over Carlson giving Holocaust denier Fuentes Nick Fuentes a friendly platform. Roberts praised free debate, then blasted a venomous coalition of critics and said canceling Fuentes is not the answer. Jewish conservatives warn this normalizes overt antisemitism on the right. During the interview, Carlson called Christian Zionist infected by a brain virus and offered no pushback when Fuentes smeared organized Jewry. Here's the core problem. Visibility is power. Handing a movements leader spotlight to a Holocaust denier isn't just asking questions, it's platforming. Ask yourself this. What would you think if MSNBC started doing soft focus chats with Lenin during the Red Terror or a far left crank praising Montreal monuments to a hypothetical killer of Charlie Kirk? We would call that beyond the pale. The same standard should apply here. This isn't free speech versus censorship. It's about whether a major institution blesses hate with primetime credibility. Okay, what's the real message here? The Heritage Foundation. A lot of conservatives like Tucker Carlson's are saying it's quite all right to give Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier, a platform. No problem here. And yet the very same people would be outraged if someone on the so called left gave a platform to said, hmm, what if we did more things to people like Charlie Kirk has happened to Charlie Kirk just asking questions. They would go berserk. Let's dig a little bit deeper here. So there are many conservatives who are troubled by Tucker Carlson's embrace of Holocaust deniers. Again, you could say, well, he's just asking questions. It's a free forum. One of the things, one of the reasons why we have a modern conservative movement was because of someone named William F. Buckley, who wrote a book in the 1950s called God and Man at Yale, started a magazine, National Review. And this was in a time when Eisenhower was the Republican president and was seen by today's standard as very, very centrist, moderate. There really weren't conservatives, so to speak, in what we really think of back in the 1950s and early 60s, other than a few crackpots like Senator Joe McCarthy who was claiming everyone was a communist. So William F. Buckley was a very, very shrewd coalition builder, political thinker, media maven. And he systematically said we're going to get rid of the anti Semites, the John Birchers, the extremists, the nutcases, the people who believe in all these conspiracy theorists. So he wouldn't let them publish in his magazine National Review he wouldn't host them on his show Firing Line. He wanted intelligent people from across the spectrum, and he gave priority to conservatives. William F. Buckley himself was a devout conservative and a devout Catholic. He was not in any way seen as a liberal, but he cared about making conservative ideas politically viable. And he worried about the taint of antisemites and the taint of conspiracy theories. Now we don't see that concern. Tucker Carlson is, on the one hand, an independent operator. He was fired, famously, from the Fox News Channel. He goes off and does his own thing on Twitter, his own social media, but he has a huge, huge following. He's got, depending on the day, the number one rated podcast in the United States when it comes to news, in some case, all categories. So he's hugely influential. He shows up in polls as a top presidential contender for the. For the Republican nomination if and when we ever have another open presidential election. So he's someone who isn't just a gadfly. He's not someone with 10,000 followers on Twitter. He's someone with millions and millions and millions of followers and viewers across social media. He's highly influential. And again, this Nick Fuentes character just denies the Holocaust. He's not someone saying, well, I have a revisionist theory about World War II, and I think the Versailles Agreement did this in a way that people weren't real. No, he's not revising facts that are commonly accepted and having a different spin or interpretation. He's denying that the Holocaust, and that has been a traditional line that no serious academic cross, because it's not true. In the same way, if Neil DeGrasse Tyson, the renowned astrophysicist, just started having on people who denied the moon landing, I think it would strike a lot of people as really weird. Neil, why are you having this person who designs science, who says the moon landing was fake, why are you having them on your show? You're kind of losing your credibility. I think Neil DeGrasse Tyson would say, hey, you're right, I shouldn't do that. And I don't think he would do that. So this is a touchy line. Sometime is having differing viewpoints is fine. Asking questions is fine. But at some point, giving a spotlight to someone who's spewing something that is seen as just pure hate isn't really advancing thought. Let's say someone on CNN just says, you know what? Here's an interesting fellow. Let's call him, you know, Sam Smith, and not the singer Sam Smith. His whole theory is, America would be much better if if we just fed all Christians to lions and he wrote books on this and did podcast on it and did YouTube channel and Sam Smith, who has, let's say a number one rated show on cnn says, wow, this is really interesting. I'm just asking questions. And he put this guy who's obviously a lunatic on talking about how every Christian should be fed to lions, eaten alive. Would that really advance any thought? What would that be doing? Journalistic. Am I saying CNN shouldn't be allowed to broadcast it? No, but it doesn't mean there shouldn't be condemnation. And Heritage foundation, they're called a think tank. They're not. Heritage foundation is really a right wing hack political operation. They're political PR for far right wing ideas. And they realize they're in bed with Tucker Carlson. The last thing they want to do is not have their experts and their favorite people not get on Tucker Carlson's show. So they're treating him with kid gloves. But there are still some honest conservative intellectuals in the world who see a long term vision of a right center right party in America holding power and they don't want to see it discredited with the associations with renowned anti Semites and people who refuse face reality. And that is what's going on here. Nick Fonte's getting more attention. A lot of extremists getting attention. If you see certain ext. I don't mean someone you disagree with. You might not agree with Congresswoman Aoc, for example, but you can't say she's fundamentally just making up things that every credible person from left to right would say. That's not factually correct. You can't say that. You can say you disagree with her philosophically, but she's not a nut. If you're seeing examples of absolute nut cases, right or left getting significant platforms, let me know. I'd love to hear about it. I'm only seeing those in the Nick Fuentes variety these days getting prominence. But I could have a bias. I might miss something. So feel free to post it. If you see other. And don't just say Bernie Sanders Again, Bernie Sanders is not denying science. He's not denying history. There really is a difference. In a moment we'll be talking about this government shutdown which does not seem to be shutting down anytime soon.
