Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) mentioned Friday that a few of his GOP colleagues are too “frightened” to affix him in criticizing Tucker Carlson’s interview with white supremacist Nick Fuentes.
Cruz made the remarks on the Federalist Society’s Nationwide Attorneys Conference in Washington, D.C., saying different Republicans quietly agree with him that Carlson ought to be rebuked for his podcast interview with the Holocaust denier however are scared to ruffle the feathers of such an influential voice in right-wing media.
“It’s easy right now to denounce Nick Fuentes. That’s kind of safe. Are you willing to say Tucker’s name?” Cruz requested.
“Now I can tell you, my colleagues, almost to a person, think what is happening is horrifying,” he continued. “But a great many of them are frightened because he has one hell of a big megaphone.”
Carlson, who hosted a wildly fashionable present at Fox Information till his ouster in 2023, usually has hundreds of thousands of views on the YouTube model of “The Tucker Carlson Show.” Apple additionally revealed that it was its hottest new podcast in 2024.
Tom Williams through Getty Pictures
Cruz mentioned he didn’t suppose it was an issue that Carlson “platformed” Fuentes however slightly that he did little to problem his visitor through the interview.
“The last I checked, Tucker actually knows how to cross-examine someone, Cruz said.
“If you want to cross-examine and challenge him, that’s fine,” he continued. “But he didn’t. He fawningly gazed at him, including when Mr. Fuentes said he loved Stalin and he celebrated Joseph Stalin’s birthday every year.”
It’s true that Carlson did little to push again on Fuentes in that second, apart from saying he’d “circle back to that.” He by no means did.
Cruz started talking out in opposition to Carlson over the Fuentes interview final week.
“If you sit there with someone who says Adolf Hitler was very, very cool, and that 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,” Cruz mentioned, referencing Fuentes bemoaning the issues with “organized Jewry in America” through the interview.
He was joined by former Senate Majority Chief Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who took goal on the right-wing Heritage Basis for saying it might not distance itself from Carlson over the interview.
“The ‘intellectual backbone of the conservative movement’ is only as strong as the values it defends,” McConnell wrote on social media final week, quoting a press release from Heritage Basis president Kevin Roberts. “Last I checked, ‘conservatives should feel no obligation’ to carry water for antisemites and apologists for America-hating autocrats.”
