THIS WEEK IN…
A SCHISM ON THE RIGHT
The fight over Tucker Carlson’s friendly interview with white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes has roiled conservatives and consumed the MAGA movement. What began as a backlash to the interview has spread to the influential conservative Heritage Foundation whose President Kevin Robert’s remarks defending Tucker Carlson and downplaying antisemitism prompted a storm of criticism. The fallout exposed the Right’s failure or refusal to confront neo nazis and extremists within their ranks and how normalized white supremacist views have become amongst them. Only over the past few weeks, the Republican Party has been grappling with a series of pro-Nazi and antisemitic incidents from a nominee boasting of his “Nazi streak” to a leaked group chat praising Hitler and a Nazi symbol spotted in a GOP congressional office. For a long time, conservatives have not only tolerated but empowered extremists’ voices which appear now to have grown too powerful to contain. It seems that the white nationalist wing is no longer on the fringe of the American Right.
In a podcast with TNR’s Greg Sargent, David Austin Walsh, an expert on conservatism decodes, how [the fallout] tells the bigger story of the American right’s refusal to police its extremists for the last half-century.
Tucker Carlson’s interview “has led to a major reckoning in the Republican Party,” reports David Gilbert in The GOP Civil War Over Nick Fuentes Has Just Begun.
Jon Passatino on the civil war engulfing the Right in the wake of the friendly Carlson-Fuentes sit-down: The Right’s Race Reckoning.
Much of the criticism has been aimed at the Heritage Foundation. Even the conservative editorial board of the Wall Street Journal faults the think-tank’s President Kevin Roberts in its piece on The New Right’s New Antisemites. Will Sommer looks at the schism growing on the Right in his piece Groyper War Consumes the Biggest Right-Wing Think Tank.
In Nick Fuentes is the GOP’s Latest Frankenstein Monster, Jet Heer describes the white nationalist podcaster’s rise as a sign that racists and antisemites are tired of being the junior partners in the Republican coalition.
Who is Nick Fuentes? A profile by David Gilbert Nick Fuentes’ Plan to Conquer America and one by Ali Breland The Firewall Against Nick Fuentes Is Crumbling.
In a prescient piece from last year, Yair Rosenberg wrote about The Anti-Semitic Revolution on the American Right.
…IN OTHER NEWS
Through acquisitions and mergers, a small group of billionaires dominates the U.S. media and has consolidated control over much of what the public sees, reads and hears. Outlets that are not yet owned by some of Donald Trump’s biggest supporters, have quietly softened their coverage of the administration’s actions and policies. Just last week, CNN’s CEO following his visit to the White House told his staff to scale back coverage of the White House demolition coverage and on Tuesday, Conde Nast announced that it will fold Teen Vogue into Vogue’s Website. The magazine, which has offered fearless political coverage of the Trump era, laid off all their political writers.
What Donald Trump friendly mainstream media looks like, show his interview with CBS last Sunday. Edith Olmstead examines how Trump feels he can now dictate CBS News’s content by telling them what to cut and omit.
Trump has celebrated CBS News’ new leadership under his billionaire buddy as the “greatest thing”. Matt Gertz looks at what this development means for the U.S. media: With Trump’s suborning of CBS News, Orbanization is just beginning.
Under the ownership of Jeff Bezos, The Washington Post has undergone quite a transformation. Michael Tomasky on the mainstream media becoming increasingly right-wing.
With the Ellison family buying up media outlets, Jake Lahut profiles the head of the media empire in Larry Ellison is a ‘Shadow President’ in Donald Trump’s America.
Alejandra Caraballo wrote about The Oligarchs’ Coup Against the Free Press.