With this conversation, Carlson provided a mighty platform to Fuentes, and this episode logged more than 20 million viewers. Some on the right were aghast that Carlson had welcomed Fuentes as if he were just another ideological comrade. Commentator Ben Shapiro proclaimed, “No to the Groypers, no to the cowards like Tucker Carlson who normalized their trash." Speaking to the Republican Jewish Coalition, Cruz said, “Now is a time for choosing. Now is a time for courage…If you sit there with someone who says Adolf Hitler was very, very cool and their mission is to combat and defeat ‘global Jewry,’ and you say nothing, then you are a coward, and you are complicit in that evil.”
Yet not everyone in MAGA land was offended by Carlson’s embrace of a Nazi.
Kevin Roberts, the head of the influential Heritage Foundation, which cooked up Project 2025, defended Carlson for his softball interview of Fuentes and assailed those criticizing Carlson, saying, “The venomous coalition attacking him are sowing division. Their attempt to cancel [Carlson] will fail. Most importantly, the American people expect us to be focusing on our political adversaries on the left, not attacking our friends on the right.” He slammed the “globalist class” for decrying Carlson, whom he hailed as “a close friend of the Heritage Foundation.” He added, “I disagree with, even abhor, things that Nick Fuentes says, but canceling him is not the answer either.” Here was the principled stand Roberts was proposing for the Trump right: We don’t cancel antisemites and Nazis.
Roberts’ support of Carlson sparked another detonation on the right. Jim Geraghty of the National Review wrote: “Really, Kevin Roberts? You think this twerp is somebody that serious thinkers of the modern right should spend a lot of time engaging with? You don’t see any issue with putting the spotlight on this guy and giving him more than two hours to spew his bullcrap with no pushback?” And there was a bit of a mutiny at Heritage. Some staffers were irate over Roberts’ comments, and at least five members of the foundation’s antisemitism task force resigned in protest. Stephen Moore, the co-founder of the right-wing organization Club for Growth, gave up his position as a senior visiting fellow at the foundation.
Roberts took a stab at damage control, issuing a statement that denounced Fuentes' “vicious antisemitic ideology, his Holocaust denial, and his relentless conspiracy theories that echo the darkest chapters of history.” Still, at a contentious staff meeting, staffers called for his resignation, while others assailed Heritage employees who were criticizing Roberts. His speechwriter, Evan Myers, snidely suggested that Heritage’s efforts to address accusations of antisemitism could lead to a requirement to attend a Shabbat dinner. That, he said, would conflict with his faith.
This was a hot mess—all caused by a twentysomething whose appearance on Carlson’s podcast brought to light the right’s long-running flirtation with antisemitism and, yes, Nazis.
Which is nothing new.
For decades, far-right Republicans have hobnobbed and collaborated with Nazis. Rachel Maddow’s Ultra podcast recounts how conservative and isolationist GOP members of Congress prior to World War II plotted with a Nazi agent to spread pro-Nazi propaganda through congressional mailings and speeches. (Remember, at the time, Father Charles Coughlin, a raging antisemite, was tremendously popular on the right. At one point, he reprinted a speech by Nazi official Joseph Goebbels claiming Jews were the real aggressors and Gentiles everywhere were victims of the evil Jews.) The podcast’s second season covers how Sen. Joe McCarthy knowingly made common cause with neo-Nazis who were looking to reconstitute Hitlerism and helped them spread anti-Jewish conspiracy theories as he waged his scurrilous redbaiting crusade.
In subsequent decades, Republicans continued to hook up with Nazis.
In 1968, a Hungarian émigré named László Pásztor worked on Richard Nixon’s campaign, helping to draw in American voters of central and eastern European ancestry. He must have done a good job, for afterward he was asked to organize the Republican Heritage Groups Council, which would be a collection of assorted ethnic Republican clubs operating as an auxiliary of the Republican National Committee. During World War II, Pásztor had been an official of the Hungarian pro-Nazi party.
During his 1984 reelection campaign, President Ronald Reagan sent a heartfelt message of support to the annual convention of the World Anti-Communist League, an organization that included neo-Nazis, death squad leaders, and assorted antisemites. WACL had been created in 1967 by the Taiwanese and South Korean governments and an outfit called the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, an umbrella group of émigrés from central and eastern European nations, many of which had fascist and Nazi roots. The ABN founder, Yaroslav Stetsko, had been a Nazi collaborator in Ukraine during World War II, when his Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists slaughtered thousands of Jews. In the years afterward, Stetsko transformed himself into a fierce foe of international communism, so much so that he had been invited to the White House in 1983 for a ceremony marking Captive Nations Week and met Reagan and Vice President George W. Bush. During the 1984 race, the Reagan campaign worked with the ABN and sent a representative to an ABN conference.
The following year, less than two weeks after he stirred much controversy by visiting a military cemetery in Germany where Waffen‑SS troops were buried, Reagan attended a luncheon at a Washington hotel honoring the Republican Heritage Council, which by now was loaded with eastern European emigres who were antisemites, racists, and Nazi collaborators in addition to Pasztor, its founding chair. The council’s executive director, Radi Slavoff, had been part of a Bulgarian fascist group. The head of a Cossack GOP unit in the council, Nikolai Nazarenko, had served in the German SS Cossack division and once declared Jews his “ideological enemy.” The leader of the council’s Romanian group was accused of being a recruiter for the Iron Guard, another fascist group. The chief of its Slovak GOP chapter was a Nazi sympathizer.
At this event, where Nazis drank and dined with Republican officials, Nazarenko told a researcher named Russ Bellant that he was in touch with various Nazi organizations, explaining, “They respect me because [I was a] former German army officer. Sometimes when I meet these guys, they say, ‘Heil Hitler.’” He also insisted Jews did not die in German gas chambers. Michael Sotirhos, the chair of the council, told Bellant the group had been “the linchpin of the Reagan-Bush ethnic campaign” in 1984, recruiting 86,000 volunteers. Before this crowd that included émigré fascists, a grateful Reagan said, “The work of all of you has meant a very great deal to me personally and to our party.”
A few years later, in 1989, David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan who left the group in 1980 to create another racist entity called the National Association for the Advancement of White People, entered a special election for a Louisiana state House seat, running as a Republican. His main opponent, another Republican, publicized Duke’s past, disseminating a photograph of Duke in Nazi regalia and circulating Duke’s endorsement of Hitler’s Mein Kampf as the greatest piece of literature in the 20th century. That did not dissuade enough Republican voters. Duke won by 227 votes.
After his victory, Duke was censured by the Republican National Committee. But a proposal for the state GOP to censure the Nazi-ish Duke was blocked by the Reverend Billy McCormack, a prominent and influential Baptist minister who had run televangelist Pat Robertson’s presidential campaign in the state the previous year and who controlled a bloc of Republican delegates. He noted that “Jewish attorneys” in the ACLU “can be just as prejudiced and just as mean as what Duke does” and that Duke was “saying some things that are very true.” So he accepted Duke into the Republicans’ ranks. McCormack around that time became one of the four directors of a new group founded by Robertson called the Christian Coalition.
Another prominent figure in the GOP had a weird association with Nazis: Pat Buchanan, the pugnacious pundit who served in the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan administrations. In the 1980s and 1990s, he established an odd record of defending Nazi war criminals uncovered in the United States. As a columnist, he urged Reagan to shut down the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, which pursued Nazi war criminals, ridiculing it for “running down 70-year-old camp guards.” He defended a Cleveland autoworker named John Demjanjuk, who had been accused of being a Nazi guard responsible for the mass murder of Jews at Treblinka and questioned whether thousands of Jews at that death camp had really been gassed. He also tried to prevent the deportation of another accused Nazi war criminal. Allan Ryan Jr., the former head of OSI, called Buchanan, “the spokesman for Nazi war criminals in America.”
When Buchanan ran in the GOP presidential primary in 1992, he drew nearly 3 million votes, losing to President George H.W. Bush. Four years later, he bagged a slight bit more and came in second to Sen. Bob Dole. Millions of Republican voters did not mind his apparent affinity for Nazis. And he was allowed to speak at the party’s national convention.
Of course, Trump has had his own Nazi moments. In August 2017, after right-wing militia members, white nationalists, and extremists waving Confederate flags and Nazi banners gathered for a Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and violently clashed with counter-demonstrators (which resulted in the death of a counterprotester named Heather Heyer), Trump declared there had been “very fine people on both sides.” (Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell replied, “There are no good neo-Nazis.”) Five years later, when he was no longer president, Trump dined with antisemitic rapper Kanye West and Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago. In 2024, John Kelly, the retired Marine general who was Trump’s White House chief of staff from 2017 to 2019, said that Trump had told him that Hitler “did some good things.”
When the insurrectionist mob that Trump incited attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, neo-Nazis were among the throng. One wore a black hoodie with a large white Nazi SS skull design and the words “Camp Auschwitz.” Another had once shared with an undercover FBI agent his admiration for Hitler and talked about a plan to “wipe out” American Jews. Federal prosecutors later described a third rioter named Timothy Hale-Cusanelli as a white supremacist and Nazi sympathizer. He has appeared in photos with a Hitler-style moustache. In the summer of 2024, Hale-Cusanelli twice spoke at events held at Trump’s Bedminister, New Jersey, country club—including at a fundraiser Trump endorsed for an organization that supported 1/6 rioters. In a video message, Trump told the attendees, “You're amazing patriots.” Ed Martin, a MAGA extremist whom Trump handed a top job at the Justice Department, presented Hale-Cusanelli an award at this event and called him an “extraordinary man” and “extraordinary leader.”
In one of his first acts after returning to the White House in January, Trump pardoned all the January 6 rioters, including these and probably other neo-Nazis. Let that register: The president of the United States pardoned neo-Nazis who were part of a mob that beat up cops and assaulted Congress in an attempt to overturn American democracy.
