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By now, most people have heard that Tucker Carlson hosted neo-Nazi provocateur Nick Fuentes on his podcast. Anyone who’s been paying attention to the former Fox News host’s moral and intellectual decline isn’t surprised.
When conservatives took offense at the podcaster’s efforts to bring a Hitler-praising groyper into the MAGA fold, Carlson’s Praetorian Guard jumped into action, claiming that shadowy forces were trying to “cancel,” “silence,” and “censor” conservatives. They sounded like a bunch of whiny, woke leftists demanding a safe space.
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Among the aggrieved was Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, who released a video filled with ugly tropes, strawmen, and red herrings meant to shield his friend from criticism, accusing those who were critical of Carlson’s softball interview with Fuentes of being a “venomous coalition … sowing division.”
Censorship is easy to define. We all have a right to speak without interference from the government. The state has no business stopping, prodding, or even suggesting that private entities limit our interactions. That’s it.
Yes, “canceling” people also corrodes open discourse and civil society. Canceling entails a mob attacking a person for an inelegant social media post or misrepresenting a theoretical argument to try to get someone fired. Canceling means banning people from making arguments on open forums or ruining someone’s life because they wore a MAGA cap to a baseball game. Pointing out that Carlson has a great affinity for Jew haters, on the other hand, isn’t “canceling” or “tone policing” or “censorship,” it’s a criticism and a fact.
A large faction of the New Right, though, seems convinced that free speech means living life without any criticism or consequence. Sorry, people have every right to try and stigmatize malevolent voices who believe women want to be raped, as Fuentes does. Trying to ostracize wealthy media personalities who normalize odious lies and indecency, as Carlson does, is a way of exercising free speech and free association.
Roberts surely understands these distinctions well, which makes his video defending Carlson and follow-up comments even more reprehensible.
In his first video, Roberts offered some perfunctory criticism of Fuentes before contending that “canceling” him was not the answer, as if the racist was, more or less, on the same side. “When we disagree with a person’s thoughts and opinions, we challenge those ideas and debate,” Roberts said.
Do we? Does Roberts? How long are people expected to debate “ideas” such as “Hitler was cool” or Holocaust denial? Would Heritage host a conference called, “Nazis, yay or nay?” If not, why not? Have we not come to a cultural consensus on those issues yet? And, if not, what other topics should we relitigate? Pedophilia? Eugenics? Where does Roberts draw the line?
The Heritage Foundation gatekeeps. Every institution with any decency gatekeeps. They do it to preserve their credibility. They do it to avoid being overrun by nihilists and frauds. They just put gates in different places.
Conservatives who spend an inordinate amount of time demanding accountability and a “reckoning” from the dishonest legacy media outlets know this well. They delight when bad-faith reporters lose their jobs. When Bud Light creates an ad normalizing transgender people, conservatives are perfectly happy punishing the company for it. Because they realize that free expression isn’t a one-way proposition.
When it looked like Jimmy Kimmel was going to be canceled by ABC for lying about Charlie Kirk’s accused murderer, conservatives rightly maintained that it had nothing to do with the First Amendment. Roberts, in fact, also noted that it wasn’t about free expression. Yet, he has now, on numerous occasions, argued that no one should “cancel” Fuentes, who called Kirk a “b****” and a “fake patriot.”
But even if Roberts were right about the need to debate Fuentes, that’s not what Carlson did. Watching the interview, you’d think Fuentes had merely flirted with some heterodox ideas in the past. The point of the interview was to lift Fuentes.
If not, it must have slipped Carlson’s mind to ask Fuentes why he thought Jews were “responsible for every war in the world” and why he wanted to deport them from the United States. Now, perhaps on those questions, Carlson and Fuentes are of one mind — it’s difficult to tell. But what about Fuentes’s position that a lot of women are “whores” and “stupid dirty b****es” who “want to be raped” and have men “beat the s*** out of them?” Fuentes said these things on his show for public consumption, not in a drunken text.
None of that piqued Carlson’s curiosity. Nor did the fact that Fuentes believes Jim Crow was better for black people, or that the Constitution was garbage, or that President Donald Trump was a traitor.
When Fuentes tells Carlson he’s a fan of the greatest mass murderer in history, Joseph Stalin, the host brushes it off as a person might react to hearing someone’s bad taste in music.
Weird, right?
Now, Fuentes is a ridiculous ignoramus and provocateur, and he’s probably never read a book on Stalin or anyone else, for that matter. There’s no reason to melt down every time he tries to shock people. Carlson isn’t an ignoramus. He knows what he’s doing.
We all know what Carlson looks like debating. Just watch him engage in a hyper-pedantic, bad-faith filibustering of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) not long ago. Though that was the only “debate” he’s had in a long time. Roberts’s good friend is monomaniacally obsessed with Israel and American Jews. But he’s also a coward who prefers giving sycophantic interviews to Chinese Communist Party fans such as Jeffrey Sachs or Holocaust-denying “populist” historians.
Yet, according to Roberts, it’s not Carlson, who says that he hates Christian Zionists such as Cruz and Mike Huckabee more than anyone, but those who are critical of Carlson who are sowing division on the Right.
No one forced Roberts, who directs a prestigious right-wing think tank with revenue of over $100 million, to put his organization’s reputation on the line for Carlson. If members of the Heritage board don’t want to be associated with a person who does these things, they would be exercising their free expression by voting to remove him. If donors no longer want to give money to an organization that spends its time defending one of the leading bigots on the Right, that would be free expression, as well.
People tell me that Roberts is a good man, and I’m sure it’s true. Even good people live with the things they say. And, as far as I can tell, Roberts has yet to walk back his gross insinuation that Israel supporters are prone to dual loyalty and that criticism of Israel is disallowed.
THE CAMPAIGN TO CENSOR SOCIAL MEDIA ACROSS THE WEST
Someone must have forgotten to give the New York Times, Washington Post, and virtually every other leftist outlet in existence the “you can’t criticize Israel” memo, I guess. Of course, oftentimes “criticism of Israel” is just a euphemism for Jew-baiting these days. When alt-right types say you “can’t” criticize Israel, they mean that they don’t like that Israel’s defenders criticize their lies about American Jews. But pretending that your speech is inhibited by a debate is also a way to chill speech.
No one should fall for any of it.