Tucker-ed out
Bigotry and conspiratorial thinking could destroy the American Right, say FreeCons
For years now, Freedom Conservatives have warned our fellow leaders, scholars, activists, litigators, and policy professionals on the American Right that nationalist populism was a wrong turn for our movement.
Just last week, we observed that prominent populists were using such terms as “legacy Americans” and “heritage Americans” to identify a group of citizens as enjoying a privileged status in the public square — and to belittle naturalized citizens and those born to recent immigrants.
Back in 2023, one of the founders of the FreeCon project, Avik Roy, pointed out that National Conservatives and other populists had criticized not just illegal immigration but legal immigration. NatCons said legal immigration made the United States “less traditionally American” and that “our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites.”
The events of the past week have brought the divide between Freedom Conservatives and our rivals into sharp contrast.
The increasingly unhinged Tucker Carlson invited racist podcaster Nick Fuentes onto his show. While Carlson remains perfectly capable of mixing it up with his guests, as exemplified by a spirited debate in June with Sen. Ted Cruz, he didn’t challenge Fuentes when the latter called for President Trump to arrest Democratic mayors and governors, decried the power of “organized Jewry in America,” and praised the murderous dictator Joseph Stalin.
Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, calls Carlson a close friend and prominently features him in promotional and fundraising pieces. After the Fuentes interview aired, online sleuth Jason Hart noticed that Carlson’s name had been removed from a Heritage donation page. Roberts then posted a video denying any effort to distance the think tank from the Carlson or his program.
Arguing that Christians can criticize Israel’s policy choices without being antisemitic, a truth not actually in dispute, Roberts thundered that conservatives “should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class or from their mouthpieces in Washington.”
In fairness, Roberts did say he disagreed with, and even abhorred, positions espoused by Fuentes. But “canceling him is not the answer either,” he insisted. “When we disagree with a person’s thoughts and opinions, we challenge those ideas in a debate.”
The ravings of bigots ought to be challenged aggressively. On that point, we agree. But Carlson did no such thing, and has himself “become America’s leading purveyor of antisemitic ideas,” according to a thorough and devastating cover story in the conservative magazine National Review.
Today we feature FreeCon analysis and commentary of the Tucker Carlson/Kevin Roberts imbroglio and what it portends for American conservatism.
Sinking ship
Thomas D. Howes is a member of the James Madison Society at Princeton University and a FreeCon signatory.
Co-host of the Reagan Caucus Podcast, Howes is also the co-author, with fellow FreeCon James Patterson, of the forthcoming book Why Postliberalism Failed.
In a recent Civitas Outlook piece, he distinguished between those who want to remain on Tucker Carlson’s “sinking ideological ship” and those seeking to return to constitutional conservatism.
“In the last few years, Carlson has become increasingly deranged in his public persona, whatever his actual beliefs or motives,” Howes wrote. “From defending Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to the platforming of a fake historian with Nazi sympathies who considers Churchill the true villain of World War II, he has moved far beyond the pale.”
Yet even after the Nick Fuentes interview, during which Carlson made no attempt to rebut his guest’s bigotry and antisemitism, Kevin Roberts “not only refused to distance himself or the Heritage Foundation from Carlson, but explicitly reaffirmed the partnership between Heritage and Carlson.”
“This, despite the overwhelming evidence of his decline into right-wing antisemitic conspiracy theories,” Howes wrote. “That is a gamble, to say the least.”
Dignity for all
Mark Tooley is president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy and editor of IRD’s foreign policy and national security journal, Providence: A Journal of Christianity & American Foreign Policy.
Tooley worked eight years for the Central Intelligence Agency and has written for such publications as The Wall Street Journal, World, Law and Liberty, National Review, and other publications
In a recent post, he linked the rise in antisemitism and other conspiracy theories to a broader turn away from America’s founding principles of civic republicanism and classical liberalism.
“Christianity’s traditional stress on mercy, compassion, forgiveness, self-denial, and love of enemy does not factor large in the Christian postliberal equation,” Tooley wrote. “Their preference for power, control, and vengeance, with obsessive disdain for minority groups like Jews, embodies what Christianity has typically warned against: the world, the flesh and the devil.
“So there’s nothing new about the upsurge in antisemitism among Christians and in society. It’s a very old evil, parcel to fallen humanity’s proclivity to fault others for the world’s ailments, when all of us as sinners are contributors.
“The lessons about antisemitism learned from the Holocaust will have to be relearned. Humanity has short memories. Affirming the dignity of all, intrinsic to Christianity, is not natural. It must be continuously retaught and incarnated.”
Flawed arguments
Noah Rothman is a senior writer at National Review and a FreeCon signatory.
Rothman is the author of The Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back against Progressives’ War on Fun (2022) and Unjust: Social Justice and the Unmaking of America (2019).
In a recent National Review piece, he underlined the flawed arguments Kevin Roberts employed in his video statement to defend the Heritage Foundation’s continuing relationship with Tucker Carlson.
“The venomous coalition attacking [Carlson] are sowing division,” Kevin Roberts claimed.
“Are they?” Rothman replied. “Is this ‘venomous’ claque really the party guilty of ‘sowing division’ here? Not Carlson, who claimed he ‘disliked’ Christian supporters of Israel ‘more than anybody?’”
“Most importantly,” Roberts continued, “the American people expect us to be focusing on our political adversaries on the Left, not attacking our friends on the Right.”
“This is also absurd,” Rothman wrote. “It’s hard to remember the last time Carlson got attention for attacking the Left. His political project is all but exclusively directed at the Right. It is an attempt to hijack and co-opt it, and Roberts’s institution has supported that effort.
“Roberts is not objecting to the policing of his side — the American Right, writ large. He’s doing that himself in this very video, but he’s policing only one side of this internecine conflict.”
Hilarious arrogance
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and a FreeCon signatory.
Goldberg is also a bestselling author, longtime columnist for the Los Angeles Times, commentator for CNN, and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
In a recent Dispatch column, he argued that by giving Tucker Carlson a pass, the head of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, is making more space on the Right for antisemitism.
“I love the hilarious arrogance underpinning the idea that the Heritage Foundation has some kind of mandate from the American people to attack the Left,” Goldberg wrote.
“Does Roberts actually believe that the American people would collectively sigh with disappointment if Heritage relented in its attacks on the Left for a moment in pursuit of some common ground? Kevin Roberts hates sowing division over Tucker Carlson because it might get in the way of the Heritage Foundation’s mission to sow division at scale. That’s some weird stuff.”
“Or to be blunt: This is one of the most intellectually fatuous and morally blinkered arguments I have heard from any self-styled intellectual of the Right in my four decades in Washington. It is shamefully stupid and ethically deviant.”
In the mix
• At National Review, one of the leaders of the Freedom Conservatism project, John Hood, argued that National Conservatives and other voices on the populist Right fail to accept timeless truths about power and corruption.
“I don’t see a triumphant movement propelling America into a brighter future,” wrote Hood, president of the John William Pope Foundation. “I see a mad scramble of squabbling factions, some blithely utopian and others longing for an imaginary past, some led by well-meaning but misguided people (including friends of mine), and others by unhinged conspiracists or cynical hucksters.”
“We are Freedom Conservatives,” he continued, “not because we believe individual liberty to be the only political end worth pursuing but because without it — without limiting the power of the state to tax and subsidize, to reward and punish — all other worthwhile ends, including personal and civic virtue, are placed in perpetual peril.”
• In the Indianapolis Business Journal, FreeCon signatory Cecil Bohanon explained why conspiratorial thinking remain an enduring part of political discourse.
“Tribalism, along with a preference for satisfying narratives over inconsistent facts, drive irrational beliefs,” wrote Bohanon and his coauthor John Horowitz, both professors of economics at Ball State University.
And “many conspiracy theories are profitable,” they pointed out. “Websites that spread false or sensational claims often earn money through automated ad systems where high-engagement conspiracy content can generate substantial revenue.”
• In The Dispatch, FreeCon signatory Charles Hilu reported the use of the Senate’s “blue slip” process to block questionable appointments to the Trump administration.
“Senate Republicans are holding firm against President Donald Trump’s pressure to scrap a longtime tradition in Congress’ upper chamber,” he wrote, “issuing a substantive rebuke to his desires and openly disagreeing with him on the issue.”
Even GOP senators normally deferential to Trump are open about their disagreement with him on this issue,” Hilu added, and “it is unlikely that Trump will persuade Republicans to get rid of the blue slip.”
• In The Washington Times, FreeCon signatory Joel Griffith argued that the president’s import taxes have been counterproductive.
“A steady stream of economic data continues to warn that the broad tariffs the U.S. has imposed on our trading partners are inflicting real damage on American growth, jobs and prosperity,” wrote Griffith, a senior fellow at Advancing American Freedom.
“Congress must reassert its constitutional role over the taxing power and end these tariffs now. Focusing on what we know creates growth: tax reductions, a slimmer government, regulatory reform, energy abundance and free trade.”