'Open revolt' among conservatives as 'MAGA civil war' rages on

CNN reports White nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes is leading a bitter split within the Republican Party and inside one of Washington’s most prominent conservative think tanks.

Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson fanned the flames when he hosted Fuentes on his podcast for an “overwhelmingly friendly conversation.” Conservatives Dinesh D’Souza and Ben Shapiro, condemned Carlson for platforming and elevating Fuentes, who has an affinity for Adolf Hitler and traffics in racist, sexist and antisemitic tropes.

But support from other major voices inside the party suggest that Fuentes’ opinions may not be a fringe element within the party but a major school of thought.

“Christians can critique the state of Israel without being antisemitic,” said Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, defending Carlson in a direct-to-camera statement that CNN reports set off a “backlash” within Heritage and raised “questions about the future of an institution that has for decades been a pillar of the conservative movement.”

Author James Kirchick told the Washington Post that the resulting “MAGA civil war” is about more than Republican foreign policy and the U.S. relationship with Israel or antisemitism.

“It’s about competing visions of America. Six decades ago, William F. Buckley Jr. performed the conservative movement and the country a service when he condemned the paranoiac John Birch Society. He performed a similarly salutary act with Buchanan 30 years later. Buckley isn’t with us anymore, and so it will be up to a new generation of conservative leaders to exercise moral hygiene and cleanse the movement of the bigots in their midst,” said Kirchick.

Kirchick went on to criticize Carlson, a former Fox News host, as a “reputation launderer” who has turned his podcast into a “weekly circus featuring guests such as rancid conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, Russian despot Vladimir Putin and Darryl Cooper, a Holocaust denier who claims Winston Churchill was the villain of World War II and whom Carlson praises as ‘the most important historian in the United States.’”

Carlson makes “reprehensible ideas respectable for mainstream conservative consumption,” said Kirchick, while describing Roberts’ follow-up speech apologizing for supporting Carlson as not “condemning” Carlson outright.

“Roberts delivered the same, equivocating message on Wednesday at a town hall with Heritage staff. Yet Roberts still seems not to understand the elementary distinction between “canceling” and ostracizing,” said Kirchick.

Meanwhile, in a separate story, the Washington Post reports The Heritage Foundation is “erupting in open revolt against … Roberts, as the right-wing think tank struggles to deal with internal and external anger over his defense of … Carlson.”

“A staff meeting Wednesday — Roberts’s latest attempt to quell a week of resignations and condemnations over his defense of Carlson — was marked with calls for him to resign” as well as antisemitic calls from other members questioning “whether Christian employees would be forced to participate in Jewish rituals,” according to the Post.

“At least five members of Heritage’s antisemitism task force have now resigned in protest, and distinguished fellow Chris DeMuth left the organization,” The Post reported, as the organization continued to rend itself between its own antisemitic and tolerant factions.

Read the CNN article here, and catch the two Washington Post reports here and here.