The late William F. Buckley, Jr. must be credited as one of the people who established modern conservatism in the United States. He had a weather eye for what or who could help or hurt the movement.
Fuentes, in his two-hour interview with Carlson, said that the principal problem in the U.S. conservative movement is the Jews.
In the early 1960s, Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society, labeled former president Dwight Eisenhower, former secretary of state George C. Marshall, and many other leading Republicans as communists. He, and the Birch Society, claimed that every federal agency had been taken over by the communists. After many debates and much correspondence with Welch, Buckley led a movement to expel Welch and the John Birch Society from the conservative movement and he succeeded.
Buckley did so with logic and reason and at great risk to himself and to his then-new publication, National Review. It was, he judged, a risk worth taking and he succeeded. He made the Birch Society anathema to conservatives.
We cannot know how Buckley would have dealt with Tucker Carlson but it is a safe bet that he would have driven Carlson and the rest of his gaggle out of the conservative movement, as he did with Welch and the Birchers.
It is now up to us to expel the loudest anti-Semites from the conservative movement. They aren’t conservatives: they are, quite simply, bad people who use the conservative brand to conceal their racism and anti-Semitism.
We know who they are and so do they. They range from Tucker Carlson (who my friend Mark Levin calls “Qatarlson” for his sympathy and emulation of the rhetoric of the Qataris who back Hamas) to people such as Nick Fuentes, who was recently given a friendly interview by Carlson.
In 2021, Carlson gave an impassioned defense of the white supremacist “great replacement” theory which holds that whites are being replaced by people of color. More recently Carlson has described Ukrainian President Zelensky, who is Jewish, as “sweaty and rat-like,” “shifty,” and “dead-eyed,” which are common anti-Semitic tropes.
In an April 2021 letter to Fox News, the Jewish Anti-Defamation League wrote that:
- “In January, Carlson offered his viewers a full-throated defense of the anti-Semitic QAnon conspiracy theory.
- In December 2020, Carlson parroted white supremacist and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories by blaming Jewish philanthropist George Soros for Americans being “robbed, raped and killed.”
- Days after the mass shooting attack in August 2019 at an El Paso Walmart at the hands of an avowed white supremacist, Carlson suggested that white supremacy in America was ‘not a real problem.’ In January 2021 he again questioned whether white supremacy was even real, saying, “So again, what is a white supremacist? You might be surprised to learn just how broad the definition for that has become.”
- In December 2018, Carlson suggested immigrants make the U.S. “dirtier.”
- Carlson has attacked ethnic diversity in this country, saying, in 2018, that it was “radically and permanently” changing America for the worse. He has also claimed that immigration makes the country “poorer, and dirtier, and more divided.”
As the ADL pointed out, this is not legitimate political discourse. It is racist and anti-Semitic.
Since his April 2023 departure from Fox News, Carlson has expressed his animosity toward Israel and its supporters much more openly. At a Turning Point USA Student Action summit in July of this year, Carlson suggested, without evidence, that Israel might be behind pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s rape and abuse of young girls, an attempt to entrap and blackmail U.S. politicians. Carlson wondered why nobody asked Epstein “you have had all this contact with a foreign government, were you working on behalf of the Mossad? Were you running a blackmail operation on behalf of a foreign government?”
In the same July 2025 event, Carlson said that Americans who served in the Israel Defense Forces “should lose their citizenship.”
On his popular podcast, Carlson platformed amateur “historian” Darryl Cooper, who Carlson called “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” During the interview, Cooper argued that the Holocaust was an accident, a consequence of wartime chaos rather than deliberate Nazi genocide, and he blamed Winston Churchill for starting World War II at the behest of his “Zionist financiers.”
Carlson’s programs have given credibility to people such as Cooper and Fuentes, both of whom appear to be Holocaust deniers, and thus, cranks.
We should remember at this point that it was President Eisenhower, when he was commander of the Allied forces that overthrew the Nazi regime, who ordered U.S. troops into the Nazi death camps to see for themselves what the Nazis had done. Eisenhower foresaw that people such as Fuentes would deny history in their pursuit of anti-Semitism.
Fuentes, in his two-hour interview with Carlson, said that the principal problem in the U.S. conservative movement is the Jews. He explicitly blamed Jews for the corruption of American politics and culture. He described Jews as “unassimilable” and that they put Israel ahead of their interest in the U.S. and said, “Judaism is incompatible with Western civilization.”
The danger to the conservative movement is clear. Consider the reaction to the president of the Heritage Foundation’s defense of Carlson.
Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation shared a video on Oct. 30, “The Heritage Foundation didn’t become the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement by canceling our own people or policing the consciences of Christians, and we won’t start doing that now.” Roberts added, “Their attempt to cancel [Carlson] will fail. I disagree with and even abhor things that Nick Fuentes says, but canceling him is not the answer either.”
This isn’t about “cancel culture.” It’s about ridding the conservative movement of the people who don’t believe what conservatives believe. After all, in the interview with Fuentes that Roberts felt compelled to defend, Carlson savaged evangelical Christians, whose support for Israel suggests they suffer from a “brain virus.” Carlson exclaimed, “I despise Christian Zionists more than anyone else on earth.” Given that around 29 percent of Trump’s voters are white evangelicals, does that sound like a winning formula for conservatives?
The Heritage Foundation has been one of the backbones of the U.S. conservative movement. But Heritage may be breaking apart. According to a Washington Times report,
Adam Mossoff, professor at GMU’s Antonin Scalia Law School, has resigned after six years as a visiting fellow at Heritage’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, citing Heritage President Kevin Roberts’ Oct. 30 video defending Mr. Carlson after his friendly interview with Hitler-praising influencer Nick Fuentes … Mr. Mossoff said in a Thursday letter to Mr. Roberts that he leaves the conservative institution with a “heavy heart,” but that he found [Roberts’s] Oct. 30 video and subsequent explanations “indefensible.”
Others have resigned from Heritage. But resignations are not enough.
The Heritage Foundation has, since it was founded, been a mainstay of the conservative movement in the U.S. Roberts should resign his post immediately and a real conservative should take the helm at Heritage.
It is time for us to expel Carlson, Fuentes, and their ilk from the conservative movement. We can do it, just as Buckley expelled Welch and the John Birch Society: by logic and reason. The proofs are entirely clear. Carlson et al. are not conservatives but they are a pernicious influence on those whose beliefs are truly conservative.
Do we have the courage to do so? We must or conservatism in the U.S. will die an ugly death.
READ MORE from Jed Babbin:
, 2025-11-17 03:19:00, 
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