Earlier this week, Tucker Carlson broke the internet.
He did this by bringing Nick Fuentes onto his show and talking for a little over two hours.
I’ve kept track of Fuentes for the better part of five years. He’s a gifted speaker who has built a cult following among young alt-right men through his proudly held and deeply disturbing beliefs.
Fuentes is a Holocaust denier. He has praised Hitler as “awesome.” He has called for another Holocaust in America and a purge of Jews. He admires Joseph Stalin. He believes the United States should renounce its founding ideals and adopt a “Catholic Taliban rule.” He is a white nationalist.
He is proud of all of these things.
Writing that list is uncomfortable because it sounds like the exaggerated caricature the media often paints of ordinary conservatives. That’s why outlets like The New York Times celebrate Fuentes’s rise — he’s the real version of the monster they’ve been describing for years. The more attention he gets, the easier it becomes to smear the entire Right.
Recently, clips from Fuentes’ show have gone viral. They’re funny, provocative, and laced with hatred disguised as irony. In a world ruled by political correctness, that mix can feel transgressive — and that’s the danger.
Charlie Kirk understood this. Despite his willingness to talk to all kinds of people, he deliberately never platformed Fuentes. He saw that Fuentes’ vision was fundamentally opposed to the American experiment—to meritocracy, liberty, and faith.
That is why Charlie Kirk — despite trying to talk to all people — explicitly avoided every platforming Nick Fuentes. Because he saw that Fuentes was someone whose goal was antithetical to the American experiment and its expressed traditions of meritocracy and freedom.
Back to Tucker.
Some on the Right quickly defended his decision. Their argument: Fuentes already has a platform, so why not expose him to scrutiny? That’s what the “marketplace of ideas” is for.
But that’s not what happened. Not even close.
Carlson handed Fuentes a massive platform to appear moderate and reasonable — the “I love everyone” version of himself. He didn’t expose Fuentes. It was more of a laundering. Tucker wants his viewers, and everyone else, to think Fuentes is a decent guy with good-faith views worth listening to.
Ultimately, with almost no pushback — aside from a token question that gave Fuentes the opportunity to sound more normal — the interview became his entry into the mainstream conservative movement. His followers are ecstatic.
That’s why so many are outraged. Tucker gave Fuentes airtime and legitimacy.
If we take a step back, what’s unfolding is much bigger than one interview. It’s the opening of a second front in America’s ideological war.
An anti-Israel — or Israel-obsessed — faction on the Right is willing to mainstream antisemitism and conspiratorialism if it helps cut off America from Israel, even at the cost of the movement’s credibility, its ability to win elections, and its moral foundations. In the end, they want to control the movement after Trump is gone.
This coincides with Tucker’s, not new, but now explicit hatred toward “Christian Zionists,” which he announced during the show. These ideas are becoming popular. The most-listened-to left-wing podcast is from The New York Times. The most-listened-to right-wing podcasts are now Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens.
On the other front stands the far left anti-Western progressives, or communists, like Zohran Mamdani, who is expected to become mayor of New York City.
The existence of these two extremes explains why, after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the Right failed to focus on radical violence from the Left and instead turned inward, debating America’s support for Israel’s war against Hamas. It’s also why this new faction on the Right has repeatedly resisted Trump’s agenda and aligned with the Left — on Iran, on Qatar, across Latin America, and on the efforts against Universities.
Together, these emerging fronts are working to fracture the political center held, for now, by President Donald Trump — his foreign policy vision, his domestic agenda, and his broader effort to restore meritocracy and push back against progressive dominance.
This is the new battle for ideas. And it’s only the beginning.
