Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said Friday that some of his GOP colleagues are too “frightened” to join him in criticizing Tucker Carlson’s interview with white supremacist Nick Fuentes.
Cruz made the remarks at the Federalist Society’s National Lawyers Convention in Washington, D.C., saying other Republicans quietly agree with him that Carlson should be rebuked for his podcast interview with the Holocaust denier but 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 asked.
“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 popular show at Fox News until his ouster in 2023, regularly has millions of views on the YouTube version of “The Tucker Carlson Show.” Apple also revealed that it was its most popular new podcast in 2024.
Cruz said he didn’t think it was a problem that Carlson “platformed” Fuentes but rather that he did little to challenge his guest during 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 back on Fuentes in that moment, aside from saying he’d “circle back to that.” He never did.
Cruz began speaking out against Carlson over the Fuentes interview last 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 said, referencing Fuentes bemoaning the problems with “organized Jewry in America” during the interview.
He was joined by former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who took aim at the right-wing Heritage Foundation for saying it would 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 last week, quoting a statement from Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts. “Last I checked, ‘conservatives should feel no obligation’ to carry water for antisemites and apologists for America-hating autocrats.”