American conservatism has reached a point of reckoning after media personality Tucker Carlson warmly welcomed white nationalist Nick Fuentes onto his show last week, which some fear signals growing antisemitism among young disaffected men on the right.
The episode erupted into an existential crisis for one of the most prominent conservative think tanks in America, the Heritage Foundation, revealing deep disagreement over what guardrails, if any, should exist in the conservative movement to prevent a descent into bigotry.
Fallout from Heritage President Kevin Roberts’ response, in which he condemned Carlson’s critics, continued over the weekend, and appeared to accelerate on Tuesday, as some donors withdrew their support and several employees resigned, including Roberts’ chief of staff, Ryan Neuhaus.
Roberts said Neuhaus, a graduate of Brigham Young University who formerly worked for Utah Sen. Mike Lee, helped to coordinate his response. Sources close to Neuhaus say he has since been “thrown under the bus” in the face of public backlash.
Some have framed the firestorm as a coordinated effort by foreign defense hawks on the right to launch an opportunistic campaign against “America First” commentators, like Carlson, and their friends in elected office, like Vice President JD Vance.
But a growing chorus of conservative thought leaders from across the ideological spectrum frame this is as a critical moment to draw a line in the sand to prevent the conservative movement from being hijacked by its most extreme impulses.
“This reckoning was bound to come sooner or later,” conservative author Rod Dreher told the Deseret News. “I think there are a lot of conservative leaders who would prefer not to have the reckoning, but it can’t be put off now.”
Who is Nick Fuentes?
Backlash to Carlson’s podcast has widened fissures at the center of President Donald Trump’s MAGA coalition, and put a spotlight on the ideological fringes that appear to be attracting young, hyper-online men.
On Monday, Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro — an American Jew, as is often pointed out by Carlson — condemned Carlson as an “intellectual coward, dishonest interlocutor and a terrible friend” for amplifying the views of Fuentes.
“There’s no question that Tucker has become the most virulent super-spreader of vile ideas in America,” Shapiro said during his radio show. “And the rest of us who oppose those vile ideas have every right to call him that.”
Shapiro devoted his entire Monday program to staking out his stance on what has become a divide over ideas and loyalties within conservatism that burst into the open after Carlson released his interview with Fuentes on Oct. 27.
Over the past decade, Fuentes, 27, has built influence among a group of internet followers called “Groypers,” in reference to a social media meme, who believe the United States should endorse white, male, Christian identity to the exclusion of others.
Fuentes’ daily video livestream is filled with vulgar statements, still available online, where he denies the Holocaust, praises Hitler, trivializes rape and declares the need to remove “perfidious Jews” from government, to force women to “shut up” and to incarcerate most black people.
During Fuentes’ appearance on Carlson’s show, the former Fox News host offered minimal pushback as Fuentes identified “organized Jewry in America” as the “main challenge” to keeping the country together, and blamed “Jewishness” as the “common denominator” pulling it apart.
Aside from questioning Fuentes’ focus on group identity, Carlson nodded along, eagerly finding common ground with Fuentes in his criticism of “Christian Zionists,” who Carlson said are “seized” by a heretical “brain virus,” and who Carlson said he dislikes “more than anybody.”
On Monday, Carlson walked back some of these comments during an appearance with libertarian comedian Dave Smith. Carlson said his intention with the Fuentes interview was to understand the thinking of “the most influential voice for men under 30 in the United States.”
“I don’t hate Jews, at all, obviously,” Carlson said. “I’m not allowed to hate any person because of the group he’s attached to — that’s what identity politics is. ... That whole way of thinking is evil.”
However, one pro-Israel Christian, Rod Dreher — previously a vocal advocate for Carlson — said the podcast host “knew exactly what he was doing” when he elevated Fuentes on his platform and gave him a rhetorical “two-hour tongue bath.”
Dreher, who once suggested Carlson should run for president, called Carlson’s decision “inexcusable.” By failing to push back against, or even to address, most of Fuentes’ core talking points, Carlson presented an inaccurate version of Fuentes, according to Dreher.
“Tucker Carlson’s audience is massively larger than Nick Fuentes’s. His platforming Fuentes gives that neo-Nazi instant credibility on the right,” Dreher told the Deseret News in an email exchange. ”It’s a complete moral disaster, in my view."
Dreher sees the feud over Fuentes as part of an “entirely predictable,” and foreboding, trend. The leftwing identity politics of “wokeness,” which captured some Democrat-leaning institutions, has now found its “mirror image” on the right.
What did the Heritage Foundation do?
Three days after Carlson’s interview with Fuentes, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, who has increasingly aligned the organization’s “one voice approach” with a more populist worldview, felt the need to come to his defense.
Since the first Reagan administration, Heritage has been recognized as one of the most effective conservative policy shops inside the beltway, vetting conservative judges and preparing the Project 2025 policy brief for the Trump administration.
In a short video, Roberts said that he abhorred “things that Nick Fuentes says.” But first Roberts vowed to never engage in “canceling our own people or policing the consciences of Christians,” and said that Carlson “always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation.”
“The venomous coalition attacking him are sowing division. Their attempt to cancel him will fail,” Roberts said. “Most importantly, the American people expect us to be focusing on our political adversaries on the left, not attacking our friends on the right.”
The online backlash was immediate, leading Roberts to issue a statement on Friday outlining which specific views of Fuentes’ he abhorred, and to give a speech at Hillsdale College on Monday acknowledging he made a mistake by not mentioning the threat of antisemitism “not just on the left, but on the far fringes of the right.”
Heritage has reportedly been plagued by internal turmoil, too. On Tuesday, the Coalition for Jewish Values resigned from the Heritage Foundation’s National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, even as the task force’s co-chairs demanded that Roberts delete his initial video, offer a public apology and condemn Carlson’s “antisemitic content.”
One of the group’s most well-known scholars, Chris DeMuth, also submitted his resignation on Tuesday, according to National Review. Roberts’ chief of staff, Ryan Neuhaus, resigned a day earlier, after his reassignment to a less visible policy role on Friday.
Neuhaus previously worked as legislative director for Utah Sen. Mike Lee after graduating from BYU in 2019, according to his LinkedIn account. Multiple attempts to reach Neuhaus went unanswered.
In a statement to the Deseret News, Lee praised Neuhaus and predicted a successful next chapter after Heritage.
“Ryan Neuhaus is a talented staffer, a great patriot, and a good man,” Lee said. “I’m certain he will continue to fight for American families and their freedoms for many years to come.”
On Wednesday, Roberts reportedly said during an employee town hall meeting that Neuhaus “had the pen,” implying that Neuhaus had written Roberts’ initial statement on Carlson. “It’s still my fault,” Roberts said. “I sat and recorded the video.”
Before resigning, Neuhaus reshared posts saying that Heritage employees critical of Roberts "should resign,“ that the Jewish Anti-Defamation League “invented cancel culture“ and that the uproar over Carlson was actually an effort to tarnish the reputation of Carlson’s ally in the White House, Vice President Vance.
One Washington, D.C., staffer told the Deseret News on the condition of anonymity that Neuhaus is “not a Fuentes fan at all” and said he is “getting thrown under the bus” as Heritage faces pressure from those who support U.S. military intervention abroad.
“Neuhaus is a very good man,” the staffer said. “In MAGA circles this whole affair is broadly seen as neoconservatives jumping at the chance to take scalps in a proxy war against JD Vance.”
Vance weighed in on Wednesday with a post on X to say “The infighting is stupid.” Vance called on everyone who cares about increasing affordability, decreasing immigration, ensuring national sovereignty and establishing peace around the world to “work together.”
Dreher sees in Vance the only person who is positioned to counter antisemitic forces rising on the right because of his personal experience achieving the American dream despite a disadvantaged background, his authentic religious conviction, his interracial marriage and his focus on family.
But in the meantime, Heritage has suffered a “massive blow” to its credibility, according to Dreher. It was unnecessary for Roberts to weigh in on the Carlson-Fuentes controversy, and should not have been done without “an actual strategy” to “face this crisis within the wider conservative movement,” Dreher said.
Jordan Hess, the former director of coalition relations at Heritage from 2017-2019, and Lee’s 2016 campaign manager, said if pundits and policymakers want to strengthen the conservative movement, they need to highlight leaders with a vision that will “resonate in the hearts and souls of the American people,” instead of giving the microphone to “those who peddle hate.”
“There is room for policy debate and disagreement within the conservative movement,” Hess told the Deseret News. “But there is no room for antisemitism, racism, and sexism. Hatred and division have never built anything meaningful or lasting.”
Where will the conservative movement go?
Long gone are the days when a William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of National Review, or an Irving Kristol, the “godfather of neoconservatism,” can enforce the boundaries of the conservative movement; social media has made sure of that.
In Monday’s recording, Carlson and Smith celebrated the absence of such gatekeepers because it has allowed the ideas of GOP rebels like Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul to flourish. But others say the Carlson-Fuentes saga shows the need to self-police.
Jonah Goldberg, the editor of The Dispatch and longtime conservative columnist, says the public disagreement over Carlson’s podcast, and Heritage’s response, is not just an online argument. It is “symptomatic, emblematic, symbolic of a larger dynamic on the right these days.”
The refusal by Vance to condemn a Young Republican group chat that included blatantly racist and sexist jokes last month is another example of an influential figure on the right fearing to upset a radical base, Goldberg told the Deseret News.
Goldberg insists he is not a proponent of “cancel culture,” where crossing ideological lines can get someone’s bank frozen, or job terminated, or account deleted. What Goldberg wants is for the conservative movement to have the courage to rebuke what it does not want to become.
“Roberts makes what he thinks is a powerful case about how the way you confront bad speech is with more speech, and you challenge ideas and you debate them,” Goldberg said. “But the criticism of Tucker Carlson is that he didn’t do that when he had a Nazi on his show.”
How conservatives react to this moment could have lasting implications.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk on Sept. 10 opened a vacuum, according to Goldberg, for those vying to be “the influencer-in-chief on the very online right.” And this space is quickly being filled by Fuentes, Carlson and fellow anti-Israel conspiracy theorist Candace Owens, Goldberg said.
Since Kirk’s assassination at Utah Valley University, Owens — who has one of the conservative movement’s largest online followings — has spun a web of speculation, claiming that Israel, and Turning Point USA, Kirk’s youth outreach organization, are at the center of the plot that killed him.
One of Kirk’s longest-running colleagues, Tyler Bowyer, said this highlights the destructive nature of social media that rewards outrageous and offensive statements that divide conservatives, while doing nothing to achieve conservative victories on the ground.
In an interview with the Deseret News, Bowyer, the COO of Turning Point Action, said Kirk understood better than anybody that debating ideas openly, and articulating a constructive alternative, is the only way to persuasively shut down bad ideas in the conservative movement.
In his final months, Kirk repeatedly called out “Jew-hate” on the right and condemned those who “blame Jews for all their problems.” While Carlson was often a keynote speaker at Turning Point USA events, the organization prohibited Fuentes and his supporters from attending.
“If you surround yourself with nothing but conflict that you’ve already addressed, or people you disagree with, then you’ll never get anything done,” Bowyer said. “Charlie debated to influence and convert people and organize them around positive action.”
The conservative movement needs more spokespeople who, like Kirk, are willing to address the factors that make figures like Fuentes attractive to young men because it is impossible to “cancel Fuentes” — and his influence is growing, according to Dreher.
Echoing comments from Heritage staffers in texts published by the New York Post, Dreher said he has “well-placed Washington sources” who say that “a shocking number” of young Republican staffers are admirers of Fuentes and Owens on many issues.
If the conservative movement doesn’t act fast to condemn and refute rightwing identitarian politics, Dreher fears it risks falling prey to the pattern that took over left-leaning institutions as establishment figures became too afraid to counter extremism in the next generation of activists.
Just days after Politico published its story revealing the Fuentes-esque contents of the Young Republicans group chat, Fuentes boasted that “groypers are all over the government ... there’s groypers in every department.”
One conservative Washington, D.C., staffer, speaking to the Deseret News on the condition of anonymity, said he thought the number of “groyper staffers” has been exaggerated.
But, according to Dreher, it won’t require an army, it might only take a small, organized group, to radically change the nature of American conservatism.
“The thing is, Heritage is only on the front line of this assault,” Dreher said. “The Groypers are coming for every conservative institution.”