Title: The Republican Party's Civil War

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Micah Loewinger: Hey, you're listening to the On the Media midweek podcast. I'm Micah Loewinger. Back in October, I spoke with Ben Lorber, a senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, about his work tracking Nick Fuentes, the Gen Z white nationalist influencer. Fuentes had been trending in the news after a leaked Young Republican's chat revealed how his ideas were taking hold in some conservative circles. Then, just a week or so later--

Tucker Carlson: Nick Fuentes, thank you for doing this.

Nick Fuentes: Yes, thank you for having me.

Tucker Carlson: I wanted to meet you. I've heard about you.

Nick Fuentes: I've heard about you.

Micah Loewinger: Tucker Carlson invited Fuentes to speak to his nearly 5 million subscribers on YouTube.

Tucker Carlson: I want to understand what you believe, and I want to give you a chance in a minute to just lay it out.

Micah Loewinger: That two-hour interview triggered a crisis among the GOP's top brass that pitted major conservative influencers against one another and garnered headlines declaring the start of a Republican civil war. This week, we decided to call up Zack Beauchamp, senior correspondent for Vox, to help us wade through all the fallout and break down what this tells us about antisemitism in American politics. Zack, welcome back to the show.

Zack Beauchamp: Hey, hey. Good to be here.

Micah Loewinger: Let's start with the debate unfolding in the GOP and the right-wing media right now, a debate that really came to a head when Tucker Carlson hosted Nick Fuentes on his podcast last month. Tell me about what you heard in that interview and why it's so significant.

Zack Beauchamp: Let's situate this. Nick Fuentes is an out-and-out antisemite. It's just very open. It's not even euphemized. Tucker had been flirting with this stuff for a while, right? Engaging in some World War II revisionism, some conspiracy theorizing, saying some very dubious stuff at Charlie Kirk's funeral, implying the Jews killed Jesus. Tucker had been on this "I'm going to wink, wink at antisemitism, without openly saying, I think Jews are the problem." In fact, he would openly deny that he says that there's anything wrong with Jews.

Micah Loewinger: He says, "I'm very moderate on Israel. I'm not against Israel. I'm not against the Jews. I just don't want to pay for Israel's war." That's reasonable, right?

Zack Beauchamp: Yes, look, a lot of it's just he has normal foreign policy views for someone who is on the MAGA, more isolationist, non-interventionist wing, depending on whose language you want to use, but it's also increasingly wrapped up in a kind of conspiratorial antisemitism that he doesn't want to own up to. This had led him to some feuding with Nick Fuentes. Carlson had tried to push Fuentes out of the right.

At one point, he referred to him as a weird, little gay kid. That's not how adults argue. I think, to say nothing of the obvious homophobia, but it is what passes for argument among a certain corner of, I would say, the gutter internet right. That's what Carlson was trying to weaponize against Fuentes, but it backfired. They had an argument, and it was widely understood by people who follow these things that Fuentes won the argument between him and Carlson.

Micah Loewinger: He won it because Nick went on this rant about how Nick represented the disaffected young white man, and Tucker is just this phony rich guy who's pretending to care about America-first, but he's just a distant rich pundit or something.

Zack Beauchamp: It's not wholly wrong. I don't want to hand it to Nick Fuentes, but in this case, he's a little on the mark. Eventually, after that general sense of defeat, Tucker has decided to cooperate rather than to fight the surge of interest in Fuentes. He has him on the show, and he does this real softball. This is something that Nick Fuentes does is when you listen to his show, his actual show, it is uncut, unvarnished, just based, disgusting antisemitism. Just the centerpiece of what he talks about is the identity of his show, right?

I've described him in print as a neo-Nazi. While he has rejected the Nazi label, I think if we can't call someone who calls for the execution of "perfidious Jews" a neo-Nazi, we've just lost any meaning of terms, right? He doesn't get to own that, but he goes on Carlson's show, and he basically is treated like someone who's critical of the bipartisan foreign policy consensus and who has questions about US assistance to Israel. He engages in his weird stuff. At one point, he talks about how much he loves Stalin.

Nick Fuentes: It's actually funny. It was December 18th, I remember, because that's an important date to me as Joseph Stalin's birthday.

Tucker Carlson: Oh.

Nick Fuentes: I'm a fan.

Tucker Carlson: You're a fan of Stalin's.

Nick Fuentes: Yes. Always an admirer, but we don't need to go into that. [laughs]

Tucker Carlson: Okay, let's get back. We'll circle back to that.

Micah Loewinger: It was weird because [crosstalk]

Zack Beauchamp: If there was ever an opportunity to push back, it's there, right? Why do you love a mass murderer? He just never came back to it.

Micah Loewinger: He didn't come back to it, did he?

Zack Beauchamp: He didn't come back to it. He didn't come back to it. The whole thing was a whitewash, and very obviously so.

Micah Loewinger: Tucker takes the L when they're feuding, but what's in it for Tucker to make nice with Fuentes? What does he get out of it?

Zack Beauchamp: He gets access to Fuentes's audience. They have overlapping audiences, so that's one thing, right? It's like if you're getting praised on Fuentes's show, maybe he gets more money, but I'm not even sure that's the primary motivation. I think the real thing that Tucker is thinking is, he needs to align himself with where the energy is at, among young conservatives who share his hostility to the traditional Republican establishment, non-interventionist foreign policy views, and increasing obsession with conspiracy theories.

If you watch Tucker's show and you watch closely, it's not just stuff about Jews that he's conspiratorial about. Today I got an email from him talking about a new conversation about chemtrails, right? He's done episodes on Aliens.

Micah Loewinger: 9/11 was an inside job.

Zack Beauchamp: Yes, right? Antisemitism is the ultimate conspiracy theory, by which I don't mean it's the most prominent or the most famous. I think it is. It is a belief that has persisted for thousands of years as a conspiracy theory. It's the first one in our modern recognizable form. It was an explanatory framework or developed as such in order to give people an explanation or something to blame when things went wrong.

The early church used this as a means of political competition with the established Jewish authorities. It would say, "Oh, well, something went wrong, the Jews killed your savior. It's their fault." That idea became a common explanatory framework in medieval Europe, so an outbreak of disease, crops fail, blame the Jews. If somebody's child disappears, the Jews kidnapped the kid and killed him.

A lot of traditional anti-Jewish tropes emerge out of this Christian antisemitism, which then evolves over the course of time, especially around the Enlightenment. In that era and the modern industrial revolution, when so many changes are happening in society, it takes on a less directly overtly Christian form. It's not "The Jews killed Jesus." It's "The Jews are responsible for whatever change in society has displaced you or changed you, or impoverished you."

You get a lot of really early texts in the genre of "There are shadowy forces at work that are manipulating the world that are behind. They have money, they have power, and they are doing things that no one else will talk about, but I will." That logical structure, which we now understand to be the underpinning of all conspiracy theories, that was invented and developed as an antisemitic thing.

If you're appealing to the kind of people and your audience, the kind of people who like this overall conspiratorial vein, there's no world in which you're not going to go back to antisemitism. As Chris Rock once quipped, that train is never late when it comes to Jews.

Micah Loewinger: I'm very interested in this idea that these influencers, and to some extent, the GOP writ large, needs to engage with these conspiracy theories to kind of exploit the energy and the audiences that want this stuff, but first, tell me a little bit about what the reaction was to Tucker Carlson hosting Nick Fuentes.

Zack Beauchamp: Remember how World War I started, right? Archduke Franz Ferdinand gets assassinated by a Serb nationalist, and that kicks off a series of escalating declarations of war by this interlocking alliance network that all of a sudden led to one incident setting the entire world on fire? That's basically what has happened in the American right in the past two weeks is that Tucker interviews Nick Fuentes, and the entire movement is forced to choose sides for one reason or another, and it's led to one of the rare instances in which the press calling something a conservative civil war actually lives up to that moniker.

Micah Loewinger: [laughs] It's a trope, but it's true because of the power players who are choosing sides here.

Zack Beauchamp: Right. The Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation is the right's most prominent think tank. The Heritage Foundation president is Kevin Roberts, who has taken as his mandate, as far as I can tell, moving it in a very Trump-aligned direction. He himself seems to be a committed right-wing Christian nationalist of one variant or another. Roberts and Carlson are close personally, and they're also close politically.

Roberts's nationalism is more friendly, more open to Carlson's anti-interventionist conspiratorial stuff than many on the old-guard right, even though he leads what is one of the premier institutions of the old guard right. Roberts releases a video where he defends Carlson in the most explicit and hardline terms.

Kevin Roberts: Christians can critique the State of Israel without being antisemitic, and of course, antisemitism should be condemned. The Heritage Foundation didn't become the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement by canceling our own people or policing the consciences of Christians. We will always defend America, and we will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else's agenda.

That includes Tucker Carlson, who remains, and as I have said before, always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation. The venomous coalition attacking him are sowing division. Their attempt to cancel him will fail. I disagree with and even abhor things that Nick Fuentes says, but canceling him is not the answer either.

Zack Beauchamp: Now, basically, everybody who understands how words worked understood this to be saying, Nick Fuentes is no longer out of line. That's wild.

Micah Loewinger: This is the same Heritage Foundation that, after October 7th, created an antisemitism task force to call out what it believed was antisemitic behavior from pro-Palestine college students, anti-war protests. The antisemitism police are kind of making an exception for an outright Nazi?

Zack Beauchamp: The calls are coming from inside the House, guys. That's the minute where this conflict really explodes, right? Because Heritage is so implicated in so many different webs of conservative influence, pretty much everyone has to take a side on, "Are you with Roberts and Carlson, or are you with their critics, who include some really prominent and powerful people?"

I'd say most of the organized Republican Party and its allies are furious, right? One of the most prominent criticisms came from Ben Shapiro, who I think it's fair to say is the most influential Jewish conservative in media in the United States. Shapiro releases a video that is mostly just clips of Tucker and Nick Fuentes talking and saying, "This is crazy. We can't have this stuff in our party."

Another guy who speaks out against it really prominently is Ted Cruz. Cruz, who has long prided himself on being the voice of the Republican grassroots, the Republicans' Republican. He's furious. By the way, there's a personal backstory here. Cruz had a humiliating appearance on Carlson's podcast at one point recently, and Shapiro and Carlson have not liked each other for a long time. not just ideological; it's also personal.

Micah Loewinger: Tucker Carlson asked Ted Cruz, who had been advocating for "regime change" in Iran, what the population of the country was.

Tucker Carlson: How many people live in Iran, by the way?

Ted Cruz: I don't know the population.

Tucker Carlson: At all?

Ted Cruz: No, I don't know the population.

Tucker Carlson: You don't know the population of the country you seek to topple?

Ted Cruz: How many people live in Iran?

Tucker Carlson: 92 million.

Ted Cruz: Okay. Yes.

Tucker Carlson: How could you not know that?

Ted Cruz: I don't sit around memorizing population tables.

Tucker Carlson: Well, it's kind of relevant because you're calling for the overthrow of the government.

Ted Cruz: Why is it relevant whether it's 90 million or 80 million or 100 million? Why is that relevant?

Tucker Carlson: Well, because if you don't know anything about the country--

Ted Cruz: I didn't say I don't know anything about the country.

Tucker Carlson: Okay. What's the ethnic mix of Iran?

Ted Cruz: They are Persians and predominantly Shia.

Tucker Carlson: What percentage?

Ted Cruz: Okay, no excuse. Okay.

Tucker Carlson: No, it's not even-- You don't know anything about Iran. Actually, the country--

Ted Cruz: Okay. I am not the Tucker Carlson expert on Iran, who says [crosstalk]

Tucker Carlson: No, no, but you're a senator who's calling for the overthrow of [crosstalk]

Micah Loewinger: This went super viral.

Zack Beauchamp: It was a journalistic masterstroke on Carlson's part, who I think is a moral monster, but has real talent. He's a good interviewer when he wants to be, which, by the way, makes the Fuentes stuff look all the more obvious as a whitewash. If someone with Carlson's skills, who got Cruz in that trap, wasn't capable of embarrassing an actual avowed antisemite, what are we doing here? The only explanation is, he didn't want to.

Micah Loewinger: Ben Shapiro accused Nick Fuentes of purposefully trying to fragment the right.

Ben Shapiro: That fragmentation is being caused purposefully by a splinter faction of people led by a young man named Nick Fuentes. They call themselves the Groypers. That splinter faction is now being facilitated and normalized within the mainstream Republican Party. The main agent in that normalization is Tucker Carlson, who is an intellectual coward, a dishonest interlocutor, and a terrible friend. Tucker Carlson, last week, was aided, abetted, celebrated for normalizing Nazism within the Republican Party by the mainstay organization of the traditional right: the Heritage Foundation.

Micah Loewinger: This was a really interesting position for Ben Shapiro to take because of Shapiro's long-standing disdain for wokeism. He seems to be against the idea that racism and bigotry are animating forces in American politics, particularly on the right, and that this type of hate should be named and called out and policed.

Zack Beauchamp: The right has made anti-cancellation and anti-wokeness into a centerpiece of its political identity. If you come out and say, "Actually, the way that Trump talks about immigrants is kind of bigoted," people in the conservative movement are going to drop you like a ton of bricks, because you can't say things like that. The one thing that you're supposed to be canceled for is trying to cancel somebody or trying to be woke.

Antisemitism scrambles all the rules. The way that I think I understand it is in these other fights, you've often ended up having the Republican Party lining up behind Trump. With that distribution of forces, the People who were sincerely concerned about rising xenophobia, anti-Black racism, sexism, homophobia in the conservative movement, those people have mostly been purged, right? They're gone.

They write for The Bulwark now, which is functionally a liberal publication staffed by former Republicans. There's no institutional counterbalances against somebody who pushes further and further on racism or homophobia. It's getting increasingly mainstreamed. On the flip side, Trump's political appeal has never been about hatred of Jews, right? He has said some things that I think are unquestionably antisemitic, and I think he does believe some things, judging by his statements.

Micah Loewinger: Yes. He used the word "shylock" earlier this year. [laughs]

Zack Beauchamp: Yes. In 2015, he gives this speech to the Republican Jewish Commission, where he talks about how "Nobody makes deals like the people in this room, and the only thing that matters with you guys is money," stuff like that, right?

Micah Loewinger: He had dinner with Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago.

Zack Beauchamp: Right. It's not that he's innocent of these charges; it's that it's just not important to him. Not only that, he finds being against antisemitism pretty useful, right? Just witness the way in which he's used it as a cudgel to go after universities. Jews occupy a different position in Republican politics, not just because of Trump, also because of the US-Israel alliance and the overwhelming influence of Christian Zionists inside the GOP.

Christian Zionists make up a huge chunk of the Republican base. With millions and millions and millions of people, their umbrella organization, Christians United for Israel, that's a really astonishingly large grassroots activist group, right? There really is a profound sense of connection to Israel.

Micah Loewinger: Yes. Can you explain that connection?

Zack Beauchamp: There are two ways to spin it: the friendly one and the hostile one. The friendly one is that evangelicals, or some of them, understand there to be a biblical obligation from God that while Christians are no longer Jews, they're not part of the Jewish religion anymore, they're a new thing after Jesus' return, there is still a sense of obligation, like that Jews were God's chosen people, as illustrated many points throughout the Bible, and deserving of support, care, and respect for Christians, and most importantly, they are theologically granted the parcel of land that we now call Israel.

There is an obligation on Christians not only to support and defend Jews, but also to support and defend the State of Israel. That is one spin on Christian Zionist theology. The other one that critics of Christian Zionism like to use is that it is part of certain understandings of the end times and Christianity that all the Jews will be gathered in Israel before the Second Coming of Christ.

Part of the apocalypse is getting all the Jews there, where they will either die or be converted to Christianity, so that it's much more cynical on the part of those evangelicals. They're just trying to get all the Jews into Israel so we can commence the end times and Jesus can come back and we can all have a paradise and the Jews will all become Christians. They certainly would position themselves against overt anti-Israel, antisemites like Nick Fuentes, who often smuggles in his arguments against Jews as arguments against the State of Israel.

That means that there is not just an elite sense that we need to defend norms of decency against bigotry in general. That's out the window in the Republican Party. That's just not where we're at right now, given that Donald Trump is in the White House. There is a sense that the US-Israel alliance is really important, even sacred, and that there is a moral obligation for the conservative movement to continue to support Israel. You see this in polling when it comes to views of Israel.

Micah Loewinger: Yes. I'm looking at a Gallup poll from July 29th of this year, which found that two-thirds of Republicans still have a favorable opinion of Netanyahu, compared with 19% of independents and 9% of Democrats.

Zack Beauchamp: Yes. If you look at support for the conduct of the war in Gaza, it's a similar story. It's lopsided and partisan in the way that people view things. It used to be that the support for the US-Israel alliance was bipartisan for a lot of different reasons, and the Gaza war has totally blown that up.

Micah Loewinger: Then, is there not some inherent risk of somebody like Tucker Carlson, for instance, who, unlike Nick Fuentes, does not simply appeal to an under-30 or under-35 crowd in staking out a position that is different from where majority of Republicans currently lie?

Zack Beauchamp: Well, I'm going to challenge the premise a little bit, because it's not that Tucker depends, in the way that Fuentes does, only on people that young, but he does reach people that young, and they're a huge part of his audience. Young people live, and old people die. If Carlson's thinking about the future, he's thinking, "What do I need to do to make my show sustainable as my Fox audience or my legacy Fox audience ages out?"

Micah Loewinger: There's a sentiment I've seen on X and to some extent in publications like The Free Press, that some Zionist Jews feel increasingly politically homeless. How would you parse this feeling among some Jews that the once bipartisan support for Israel poses a threat to them and their safety?

Zack Beauchamp: This is a really complicated question. There is antisemitism on the left, I think, and the statistical evidence bears this out, that it is less prominent on the left than on the right, and in fact, that the commonly stated view that anti-Zionism is antisemitism is not true in the sense that opposition to the State of Israel does not translate into interpersonally hostile views of Jews or hostile views of Jewish influence on American politics or American society. That being said, it can, right? It does not necessarily, but it can.

Micah Loewinger: When and where? Can you give some examples?

Zack Beauchamp: What I think is a straightforward example is defending October 7th. You are not morally serious as an interlocutor. You are, if not directly antisemitic, functionally so, and not worth being taken seriously, and not worthy of a spot. I think, as someone broadly on the political left, in a left-wing political coalition, there are lines, and they should be drawn there, right?

There are some people like that. We've seen it, especially among campus pro-Palestinian groups. There's been some, like the national umbrella group for Students for Justice in Palestine, put out a statement celebrating October 7th as an act of resistance. That's awful. That's evil. People like me should be saying that that's awful, but that does not mean that the millions of Americans who've attended protests against Israel's horrific and morally unacceptable slaughter of tens of thousands, at a minimum, of Palestinians, that those people, those ordinary, are antisemites or hold any of these views about the acceptability of political violence against Israeli civilians.

That's not true, right? There's no evidence that that's true. All the evidence that we have, in fact, suggests that most of these people simply oppose Israel's conduct during the Gaza war, which is morally unacceptable and is indefensible. Regardless of what one thinks of the events of October 7th, the way in which Israel has fought this war is indefensible. There's no reason to think that's an antisemitic view. I think a lot of these arguments about there being a parallel with Nick Fuentes on the left depends on the equation of that kind of view, right? Criticism of Israel's conduct, even in harsh terms, with outright antisemitism.

Micah Loewinger: I guess this is the false equivalency that I kind of want to knock down, which is that even though there's a perception of antisemitism on both sides of the political spectrum, it does not feel fair to me to hold up a minority of college students on one hand, and on the other, some of the most influential right wing influencers and political commentators who have just gotten a blessing from one of, if not the most important right wing think tank, right?

Zack Beauchamp: I couldn't agree with you more. I couldn't agree with you more.

Micah Loewinger: This is apples and oranges.

Zack Beauchamp: Yes. No, it's not comparable. It's not comparable. One fight I often have in intra-communal Jewish settings is, people will worry about what's going on in college campuses. I try not to dismiss those sorts of things, but I'm like, "I think we're missing the big picture here, which is that institutional antisemitic power has aligned in large part with the Republican Party."

Micah Loewinger: Okay, Zack. As we watch this, this civil war on the right, which you do not think is too strong language, what are you keeping an eye on? What's the next shoe to drop, if there is one?

Zack Beauchamp: Here's what I would watch as a bellwether for what's going to happen and where power lies. What happens to Kevin Roberts?

Micah Loewinger: The president of Heritage Foundation?

Zack Beauchamp: Right. Roberts really stuck his neck out for Carlson, and he's experienced massive blowback for it. If Roberts survives this, it would suggest that this is not yet a mortal sin, that he has a future still after doing something like that. If he doesn't, if he gets ousted and then gets exiled to the political wilderness of, I don't know, Substack or whatever, then that would be a real sign that the gatekeepers still have a lot of power.

Micah Loewinger: What if he survives this, and if his defense of Nick Fuentes becomes a kind of institutional green light from the Heritage Foundation?

Zack Beauchamp: It could become more and more normal. Even though he apologized for it, if he survives, it may be something that other people in the conservative movement start playing footsie with, too.

Micah Loewinger: Zack, thanks so much.

Zack Beauchamp: Thank you.

Micah Loewinger: Zack Beauchamp is a senior correspondent for Vox. [MUSIC] Thanks for listening to the Podcast Extra. Don't forget to tune into the big show this weekend to hear the final installment of The Harvard Plan, our collaboration with The Boston Globe, a deep dive into the Trump administration's war on academia and science research funding. In the meantime, consider following the show on Bluesky and Instagram. Just search On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

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