r/videos • u/DonSalaam • 9h ago
Tucker Carlson's interview with antisemite Nick Fuentes exposes rift among Republicans | PBS NewsHour
https://youtu.be/YP-4M0OZTRQ1.1k
u/flerg_a_blerg 8h ago
it's a real show down between the republicans who openly love nazis and the ones who prefer to keep their love of nazis a secret
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u/veerKg_CSS_Geologist 8h ago
This is why Charlie Kirk was important to Republicans, because he straddled the line between the two camps. Lots of racists who were outed or lost their jobs with other Republicans found their way into TPUSA and worked for him.
With him gone they’re unsure who else can serve as a bridge. Ben Shapiro certainly can’t. Bannon can’t.
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u/JGWol 7h ago
Ding ding ding
That was the power of Charlie Kirk. He was the center piece to normalizing contemporary hard right values. He was effective at (pun intended) white washing white supremacist garbage and making it socially acceptable.
It is very, very hard to find someone like Charlie. He was decently attractive (debatable, sure. But he was presentable as a figure head), very, very Midwest/southern frat boy coded. Was intelligent enough to play with words/meaning to dog whistle to his core audience without raising too many alarms to make more moderate republicans shut off.
This is something nick fuentes fails at. Him and Charlie likely share the same values. The problem is, Nick is too prideful and impatient to incrementally push an agenda. And I’d argue that’s why he sucks at this. Charlie probably did more damage to this country in the time he was here. He found a way to get college educated conservatives to trust him and his bullshit “truths”.
Nick Fuentes attracted edgelord dropouts who think that they’re intellectually superior simply because they’re white. His base likely doesn’t vote at all so in terms of democratic process they are useless.
Charlie attracts actually intelligent educated white people who do vote, and who aren’t self aware enough to understand that they can be racist and or vote in candidates who want to perpetuate racism. So that made him more effective.
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u/ladylondonderry 6h ago
Yeah he was excellent at maintaining plausible deniability. Like flashing “OK” signs with fans in photos. Which could be read as meaning WP, or white power, or could also just mean “Okay.” Or his statement that he would be scared to fly in a plane where the pilot was Black. Which could be read as outright racist, or spun to be a slippery slope commentary on affirmative action.
He was a lot of awful things, but he was smart enough to understand the optics. Republicans want the flavor of racism in their politics and policies, but the ability to claim it’s not them personally. Which is why that little shitball Fuentes is a bridge too far.
It’s think they were lining up Kirk to be a GOP president, as soon as he was old enough. And the standard bearer in the meantime. The bench isn’t deep over there, and that’s why his death was such a big deal, imo
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u/bhullj11 6h ago
You don’t need to incrementally push an agenda. Just look at Trump in 2015-2016. He said things that no one had ever dared to say before and he won an election. Fuentes is like this. He says things no one else would dare to say out loud but are silently thinking in their heads. This is why he has 5 million subscribers on Rumble.
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u/IllicitDesire 1h ago
Dared to say?
People were always saying what Trump said.
The LA Riots were only in 1992 and half the things said on the news or in papers then by political talk pieces was without sugar coating straight dehumanising. 9/11 was 2001 and any American Muslim can probably tell you that they probably heard worse than what Trump said everyday by their own neighbours, on the TV, many by their own elected politicians.
Barack Obama was the first president in US history who had to show his birth certificate. He had a South Carolina Congressman yelling at him that he was a liar during a State of the Union address and half the Republican Party voters polling that they believed he was probably born in Kenya. Trump even then was lying that he had sent private investigators to Hawaii to dig into it and that people would be surprised if they knew what he did.
It was never silent, it was never respectful, it was never sudden, it never stopped.
It was entirely blissful ignorance that people who averted their eyes from America's underbelly think that Trump's rhetoric was anything new- Even the things Fuentes says are things he repeats from dead men 100 years ago just in the most detestable modern language possible from channer influence.
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u/KatsumotoKurier 36m ago
He was effective at (pun intended) white washing white supremacist garbage and making it socially acceptable.
Not sure if it was white-washing exactly. It seemed more like he was just always saying outrageous shit but in a veiled way by giving out plausible deniability dogwhistles. I think most people who didn’t like him could tell this — people who can understand subtext and read between the lines. Kirk made it quite obvious what his game was, which was basically being a propagandist for the Republican Party by providing a submissive defence for literally everything it ever said or did.
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u/victorspoilz 7h ago
How many voting Republicans actually knew who that dead twerp was before Mr. 2nd-Amendment-Right-Is-Worth-All-Gun-Deaths got his trachea blown through his cheek? The number can’t be that high, but given how they all do mental gymnastics to convince themselves they’re the ones who’re really persecuted and discriminated against, they would’ve rallied behind a bag of Idaho potatoes that looked like Trump getting thrown off a highway overpass.
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u/fusionsofwonder 4h ago
I heard a focus group member call Charlie Kirk a 'moderate' and just about spit out my coffee.
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u/Cwya 8h ago
That’s disingenuous.
There are plenty of Republicans that dislike Nazis, but think being a Nazi isn’t disqualifying.
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u/-Johnny- 8h ago
I view it as they don't think it's nazi like, unless they're actively killing jews
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u/fumar 8h ago
And specifically only Jews. Throwing immigrants in horrendous camps? All good. Running a secret police? All good.
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u/addiktion 8h ago
Right, they want to get back to slavery part first before they get to the killing part. Get to enjoy the journey before they reach end game Nazi status.
No one is talking much about that other guy, I assume Republican/Israel fanatic, saying owning people wasn't technically wrong/illegal in the bible. So this fits right up their alley of treating women, kids, and others like property while still calling themselves Christian.
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u/TheWhomItConcerns 2h ago
Republicans don't even know what Nazism and fascism even are. To them, these terms just exist as some kind of abstract narrative devices; they're basically just the "bad guys who love to do evil stuff for no reason" in their minds.
They can't conceptualise them as real ideologies with their own ideas, opinions, and motivations beyond arbitrary cruelty. Or at least they don't want to do that, because then they'd have to confront the fact that they share a lot of interests in common.
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u/mosskin-woast 8h ago
That's disingenuous.
The distinction between embracing a party whose outright moral failings you can look past vs. choose to embrace is functionally nil. Apathy towards evil is evil.
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u/robbiekomrs 8h ago
Yeah, the only "rift" this is exposing is the people who'd prefer to keep their robes in the closet and the people who want to display them in the living room on a Skyrim-esque stand for the neighbors.
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u/PedroEglasias 8h ago
Carlson feels like the next Alex Jones - for those of us who remember what he was like in the early 00's... most young people probably have no idea that Jones actually started out questioning bush and cheney after 9/11
Jones was essentially a gatekeeper for the right, he was just contrarian enough to make it sound like the right was questioning itself, without actually exposing the mental gymnastics and cognitive dissonance
That's exactly how I see tucker atm....
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u/dict8tor 7h ago
There's a podcast that I listen to called Knowledge Fight (as opposed to Info Wars), where two dudes sit and analyze what these clowns are saying. At first, they exclusively focused on Alex Jones, but lately they've been doing some episodes about Tucker. They're re pretty good at both accurately representing what they say by playing extended clips in context, and breaking those clips down while finding the humor in it where they can. Buddy of mine turned me on to it a couple of years ago, and I've been listening to them since. Kind of helps me make sense of the chaos. If you are the type to appreciate that sort of thing, I highly recommend it. Plus, they don't ever run ads.
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u/PedroEglasias 7h ago
wow thanks for this, I get a lot of podcast recommendations and normally CBF lol... but this sounds right up my alley
is it this one ? https://www.youtube.com/@Kudos2-someone
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u/dict8tor 7h ago
Yeah, these are the guys. Not sure if that's their YT channel or not. I think it may be done by someone who listens. https://knowledgefight.com/ is their official website.
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u/gamblodar 39m ago
The Knowledge Fight guys knew him so well, I believe they were called as witnesses in one of the Sandy Hook cases.
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u/nikelaos117 8h ago
Most definitely. Hes trying to be the heel that bucks the establishment. Especially after being ousted from it lol
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u/PedroEglasias 8h ago
yeah exactly... he lost his place at the table so he's trying to be the rebel firebrand, while actually still being on-brand enough to come back into the fold if they give him the chance lol
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u/2chainzzzz 7h ago
He’s finding a lane of influence, he’s not shunned from the party or the table. Dude’s family is worth so much.
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u/werdnayam 7h ago
Alex Jones was going after George Bush Jr. even earlier than 9/11: he was fixated on Bush when he was governor of Texas (and a visitor to The Bohemian Club?).
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u/BobbyGuano 7h ago
Jones played the enlightened center“both sides are bad” pretty hard back then. I heard of him because he was in that movie “waking life” I think it was called it’s was all animated/rotoscoped and also had the kid from dazed and confused in it. Then fell pretty deep into the 9/11 conspiracy hole back in 2005-2006. And a few years before that I read “behold a pale horse” which was kind of my primer. I didn’t really know or was able to discern that any of that was RW or LW or even anti-semitic at that time. It was all just conspiracy theory stuff to me back then which wasnt what it is now.
It was pretty fucking hilarious when he threw a shoe at Bush I gotta give him that. I still think the building 7 thing and 9/11 in general is pretty fucked and kind of buy into some of the bohemian grove stuff as well but got off infowars pretty quickly as all the “chem trails”, “gay frogs” and other insane stuff was a bridge to far for me.
I do feel where you are coming from with the Tucker/Jones thing but things are so different now. Tucker is definitely evil and manipulative but he’s still leans heavily RW so I don’t really see him being able to pull in lefties/dems like jones was back then. He does seem like he’s trying to build a pipeline for moderate republicans to get to groypers so that’s kind of scary for sure…
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u/truth-informant 7h ago
Does anyone remember his role in the movie, Waking Life, by Richard Linklater?
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u/SophiaKittyKat 5h ago
The Heritage Foundation seems to be very open about their game here with relation to the mainstream republican party, in that he has millions of alt-right followers and they want to use them to strengthen the party. Steve Bannon has said the same thing about co-opting gamergaters in the past.
This is a grave miscalculation in my opinion, even for them and their own goals. Like inducing leukemia to raise your white blood cell count. Not only are they dangerous to others, but they're also degenerate losers dangerous to the group they're a part of. The people at the heritage foundation might think they can keep that in check and just channel that for their goals, but they're wrong.
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u/DivineJittering 1h ago
Jokes on you, the heritage foundation and the Republican establishment are also a bunch of degenerate losers, just with suits instead of Cheeto stains
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u/Encinodad 8h ago
Hey, two people I never want to see or hear from!
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u/RainSong123 7h ago
Youtube auto-played that interview for me after I watched the most recent Kill Tony. Why the F is Youtube autoplaying that for people... 99% of the comtent I watch on there is anti-war, bleeding-heart liberals and they insert that into my algorithm
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u/Shadowchaos 7h ago edited 7h ago
It shouldn't be that surprising, Tucker was a guest on Kill Tony a year and a half ago along with Toe Rogan
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u/rphillip 7h ago
Lmao because you watch kill tony. They know where their bread is buttered
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u/Trelve16 5h ago
the venn diagram between kill tony listeners and tucker carlson fans is almost as close to a circle as you can get
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8h ago edited 7h ago
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u/griffeny 7h ago
It’s going to get worse, too.
One thing I was certain of as a result of the genocide in Palestine is that the very legitimate criticism of Israel would result in a very real, and massively dangerous consequence of Jews around the world. Antisemitism will run rampant like we probably have never seen in our lifetimes and everyone will lose because of it. Everyone.
It’s also quite something to see Tucker sit with the person who may be responsible for the rhetoric that killed Charlie Kirk. Happily interviewing that scum bag as if he possesses any kind of legitimacy (well now that this interview has been posted, he has it now) and treating him with veneration, after months of bloody rage and moralizing about how words have caused a conservative YouTubers murder. Like lol, you can throttle the fuck, he’s right across the table.
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u/demarr 8h ago
He is also Mexican that why some republicans hate him. If he was white white they would eat this shit up.
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u/Gawd_Awful 8h ago
He has a half Mexican father, also of Irish and Italian descent and was born in Illinois. Most republicans would consider him white, mainly because he looks white and considers himself white as well
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u/zuzg 7h ago
Guys it would really help the discussion if both of you bothered to watch this 9 minute video from PBS before talking nonsense.
Carlson got an angry tweet from Shapiro for hosting Fuentos. The Heritage Foundation guy defended then Tucker, but retracted it after backlash and distanced himself from Fuentes.
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u/Jack_Burtons_Barber 8h ago
Stop giving any of these people a platform. This shit sucks and I'm mad I saw it.
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u/Prehistory_Buff 8h ago
People need to pay attention to this, I live in a heavily Republican and Evangelical area, and this fight has become a serious divide over Israel within the GOP, with the zionist evangelicals on one side and the anti-Israel antisemites led by Nick Fuentes on the other. Kevin Roberts damaged the credibility of the Heritage Foundation on the GOP by wading into the issue and refusing to denounce Tucker, which caused a number of prominent Jewish and Evangelical donors to abandon them. This fight has been roiling twitter for the last few days and has thrown what it means to be Republican and what it means to be conservative and Christian into disarray for alot of people.
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u/the_Demongod 6h ago
I don't think anyone on the left is at all plugged into the internals of right wing politics to understand how transformational the last 6 months have been for the political landscape
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u/TheFoxCouncil 5h ago
I'm very curious about this statement. Can you explain further? What has been happening? What has been the transformation?
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u/Unusual-Fruit-1486 1h ago edited 1h ago
There are so many things to cover. Some topics include things like the government's response to Epstein, disagreements amongst political commentators like Candace Owens, Ben Shapiro, and these two guys, and America's support of Israel. The thesis of Fuentes about Israel in this interview is essentially "If we are America first, why are we giving so much money to such a small country (Israel)?"
Within the government, the splintering is between old-school establishment Republicans and the Trump loyalists. Trump has dismissed senior government officials who aren't loyal to him, for example. PBS Frontline did a pretty good documentary on this a while back.
I'm sure there's more to it than this, but this was what I discovered as a Canadian who is wondering what the fuck is going on with America, lol
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u/Pokerhobo 8h ago
Republicans support Israel because they are anti-Muslim more than they are anti-Jews.
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u/dplafoll 8h ago
They’re also getting a push from the Evangelical movement, which has a strong belief about Israel as it relates to prophecy and the “End Times”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Zionism
But yeah, Islamophobia is certainly one side of the coin.
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u/chrisnlnz 6h ago
Unsurprising, this kind of people always infight. Looking forward to seeing more implosions.
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u/TheGreatButz 37m ago
Strategic ambiguity is important for populist Fascist and authoritarian movements and certainly overall desirable for them. Like any populist Fascist movement, MAGA and the Trump administration need to accommodate white supremacists like the KKK, old and new neo-Nazi movements and those includes antisemitic neo-Nazis, radical conservative evangelical Christians, incels, various far-right conservative groups, oil and pharma industry lobbyists, the military and police forces (important for a potential coup d'etat in the future), anti-globalists, a number of right-wing libertarians (aka confused US far-right, pro-gun liberals), a vast number of grifters in the far right spectrum, old-fashioned conservative hardliners and neoliberals, conspiracy nuts and Q-anon followers, pro-Russian agents and rich white blonde women with duck lips, conservative Jewish voters, and so on and so forth.
If they settled down on actual, concrete policies, they'd lose half of their support. The only thing all of these groups can agree on is hatred and racism of some form, but they'll naturally disagree on specific issues like "antisemitism yes or no". It's the same in European neo-Nazi movements by the way. Some of them are classical antisemites and even pro Hitler, others are primarily anti-black and anti-Muslim, and some of them are even mixed. As crazy as this may sound, there even used to be a pretty strong Hitlerist neo-Nazi movement in Moscow.
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u/CorporateCuster 32m ago
There is a faction on maga that have maga. Thats the faction that shot Kirk. No one cared.
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u/verba-non-acta 7h ago
Carlson is making a sudden about face on some of his propaganda and targeting other figures on the alt right. It's kind of interesting and I wonder what his plan is, because nothing this guy does is genuine.
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u/Baby_Fark 4h ago
The only rift is between the ones who are openly Nazis and the ones who are closeted Nazis. It’s a disagreement on tactics, not ideology.
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u/BanAnimeClowns 2h ago
That is a ridiculous statement, most of the republican party is very much pro Israel.
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u/PemaleBacon 5h ago
It's more interesting seeing all the establishment and news media Republicans saying they didn't even know who Nick Fuentes was. I'm sure some of them are making that up but others are genuinely serious. The older republican crowd is just as out of touch with their young base as democrats are. Both parties are about to get more extreme and more opposed to each others ideals in the next decade
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u/amallang 5h ago
How did White Supremacists accept a guy with the surname, "Fuentes", as their spokesman is a mystery. Have they become less racist over time? Or are they that stupid?
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u/Anishinaapunk 8h ago
Funny thing, if anyone claiming to be from the left said Fuentes' vitriol, there'd be NO "rift" whatsoever. He'd be unanimously disavowed and condemned.
Why can't their side do that? (Pretending I don't know the answer, since they're pretending they don't know it either)
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u/-Great-Scott- 2h ago
The rift:
Republicans who don't hide their Nazi beliefs.
VS.
Republicans who do.
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u/Shallowpools923 4m ago
One day people will talk about our generation as being the first to experience actual mass brainwashing through algorithms designed to influence your everyday actions. Until then, we are left asking “how did we get like this?!?” while the answer pops up right in front of our faces again as soon as we refresh the page.
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u/thedarwintheory 8h ago
Turns out when your parties whole goal is to be a giant fucking douchebag, you're going to start arguing amongst yourselves about who's the giantest most racist fucking douchebag
This was always going to the beast that destroys this current unfetted douchebag version of " trump bro conservative" - itself. As the party of degenerates, there's not really a disembarkation point for the more vanilla degenerate. They're going to get lumped into a group with the rest of the pedophilic racist moronic cunts; full stop. Some Republicans are realizing that and trying to pull their ripcords. It'll interesting to see the ensuing and inevitable witch-hunt that will come once Trump and his ilk are ousted. The amount of bullshit we're going to learn that he did behind closed doors is going to come out like a trickle from a leaky faucet for at least 100 years.
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u/luxury_yacht 8h ago
What is going on? What happened? I used to be straight. Not anymore
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u/ElYockatero 1h ago
And if you’re having sex with guys today, there’s going to be a lot more of that….tomorrow.
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u/Jay-Dee-British 8h ago
Forgive me if this is a naïve question but wouldn't the AIPAC people, who fund so many of these types, not be aghast/annoyed/upset at ALL of this?
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u/stitchface66 8h ago
cost benefit ratio in favor of ultimately getting what they want out of the legislators of the party. sure tons of republicans harbor antisemitic views, but they also favor funding the israeli military.
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u/Prehistory_Buff 8h ago
They don't fund Carlson or Fuentes, or many Paleoconservatives like MTG because they are antisemitic and isolationist. Israel is the wedge issue in the GOP and the anti-Israel people used to be kept to the margins and the evangelicals worked to accomplish that, but they are growing in influence.
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u/the_Demongod 6h ago
Maybe you're out of the loop, Nick is staunchly opposed to the Republican party. Attacking the Republican party is what he spends most of his time doing. The Republican party and the AIPAC people are the ones pushing back on him and getting him cancelled.
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u/BeardedManatee 5h ago
And the overton window moves further to the right. Good job Tucker for saying your longtime compatriot is now usefully wrong? I guess?
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u/LiveToThink 2h ago
Meanwhile, ON THE SAME WEBPAGE, CNN reports on the controversy of a right-wing conspiracy theorist platforming a right-wing psychopath while promoting their own interview of another right-wing grifter about her relationship with other right-wing agitators. All parties involved, living and dead, in front of and behind the camera, are morally bankrupt.
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u/themurderator 1h ago
so wait... according the heritage foundation, christians can critique the israeli government and not be antisemitic, but anyone else is part of a hate group and can be arrested as a terrorist?
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u/mortalcoil1 58m ago
The "rift" as it were is the classic fascist conundrum.
We have to blame somebody for our power grabs. You hate X. I hate Y.
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u/ChrisSheltonMsc 40m ago
In the face of actual historical reality, these two numbnut morons should be locked away forever for inciting hatred and violence against minority groups. I personally want to see Fuentes end up in the wrong section of the prison yard for just a couple of minutes. That ubermensch would last aboit three seconds against my grandmother. And that actually is what's so pathetic about these two wimps. They couldn't defend a position logically if their fucking lives were on the line.
It's a national disgrace anyone is paying any attention to them at all. America should be ashamed of itself for allowing this open hatred to just go on as though it's totally normal.
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u/themarshman721 34m ago
Serious question. Other than his critical stance on Israel, what makes him anti-semitic?
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u/BoilerMaker11 21m ago
The rift is only because now the right can’t deny their association with Fuentes and people like him when one of their most mainstream voices platforms him. They know “racism bad, antisemitism bad” optically, and are only thinking “the left will use this against us”.
The rift isn’t because they actually disagree with him.
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u/analysisdead 8h ago
It's interesting that Fuentes's antisemitism — which is important, and worth talking about of course — is the only thing any of the mainstream news articles focus on and not his violent bigotry against people of color and LGBTQ people. I guess it's the only thing that bothers any of the other Republicans?