Politics
Ben Shapiro blasts ‘intellectual coward’ Tucker Carlson after Nick Fuentes interview
Conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro blasted Tucker Carlson on Monday, calling him “the most virulent super-spreader of vile ideas in America.”
In an episode of “The Ben Shapiro Show” released Monday, Shapiro criticized Carlson’s podcast episode with Holocaust-denier Nick Fuentes, saying Carlson failed to push back on Fuentes’ bigotry.
“The issue here isn’t that Tucker Carlson had Nick Fuentes on his show last week. He has every right to do that, of course,” Shapiro said. “The issue here is that Tucker Carlson decided to normalize and fluff Nick Fuentes and that the Heritage Foundation then decided to robustly defend that performance.”
Carlson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Shapiro’s critique is the latest crack in a conservative movement splintering over Carlson’s inflammatory interview with Fuentes. The interview, which aired last week, was laced with antisemitic references and sparked division within the Republican Party over whether the discussion should be allowed or condemned. On the podcast, Fuentes praised Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and claimed the “big challenge” to unifying the country was “organized Jewry.” Carlson, a former Fox News host who retains a large following, said Republican Israel supporters suffer from a “brain virus.”
The podcast episode was received differently by two bastions of conservative thought: The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board condemned it, while Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts defended it, criticizing the “venomous coalition” attempting to “cancel” Carlson after the interview.
“I disagree with and even abhor things that Nick Fuentes says, but canceling him is not the answer, either,” Roberts said. Roberts later explicitly condemned antisemitism and detailed his disagreements with Fuentes.
Shapiro pushed back on Roberts’ characterization. “It is not cancellation to draw moral lines between viewpoints,” Shapiro said. “In fact, we used to call that one of the key aspects of conservatism.”
Carlson’s interview with Fuentes came on the heels of other high-profile incidents of antisemitism on the political right. Last month, a nominee to lead the Office of Special Counsel withdrew his nomination after bragging of his “Nazi streak” in a text message; days earlier, Blue Light News reported on a leaked group chat of Young Republicans who praised Hitler and joked about the Holocaust. The same week, a Nazi symbol was discovered hanging in a GOP congressional office.
Shapiro, a prominent conservative podcaster who hosted fundraisers for Donald Trump and Senate GOP candidates during the 2024 cycle, warned that a “splinter faction” of white supremacists is being “facilitated and normalized” into the Republican Party’s mainstream, aided by Carlson.
“The main agent in that normalization is Tucker Carlson, who is an intellectual coward, a dishonest interlocutor, and a terrible friend,” Shapiro said.
At the annual Republican Jewish Coalition annual leadership summit last weekend, top GOP Jews attempted to distance Carlson from the GOP mainstream. Matt Brooks, CEO of the RJC, told reporters that antisemitism is “a very small, limited problem in our party,” and attendees waved printed placards that read, “TUCKER IS NOT MAGA.”
Shapiro, who is Jewish, warned that the GOP is “being eaten by its radicals.”
“The left followed its radicals to electoral hell,” Shapiro said. “Apparently, many on the right wish to do the same.”
No matter the result on Wednesday night, the roughly 60,000 Bosnian Americans who call St. Louis home — reportedly the largest population of Bosnians outside Bosnia and Herzegovina — will have something to celebrate. Many, however, are unapologetically cheering for their homeland when it takes on the country they now call home.
“They are like dressing up in the jerseys, singing the anthem,” said Ibro Tucakovic, a Bosnian immigrant who arrived in the U.S. in 1998 and became the first Bosnian immigrant to seek elected office in Missouri. “Looking at my daughter, when we won against Qatar, she was crying. And so basically they, they can see the happiness in their parents’ eyes, because it means so much to us. So the kids are basically just going nuts over it.”
Mirhad Hasanovic, a Bosnian immigrant who came to the U.S. in July 2001 and is now a legislative staffer running to represent parts of St. Louis’s South County in the Missouri statehouse, said it was “unfortunate” that his two favorite countries are playing against one another so early on in the tournament.
“For Bosnians, this is huge,” he said. “We’re a very small country, so just to be able to be at the World Cup and compete is an achievement in itself. “Kids grow up at the age of three or four, they start playing, they start watching, they start going to all the leagues, so the excitement level is out the roof.”
For refugees whose memories of Bosnia revolve around war and genocide, its first-ever appearance in the knockout rounds has become a way to reconnect with the country they fled.
“It’s not very often that you get, like, really great news from Bosnia,” said Adna Karamehic-Oates, director of the Center for Bosnian Studies at Saint Louis University. “People want good stories that come out of Bosnia, and that’s why they’re so happy.”
As a rule, JD Vance seems to go out of his way to say whatever Donald Trump wants him to say, but from time to time, contradictions emerge between the president and the vice president.
Take the recently passed housing bill, for example, which arrived at the White House earlier this week.
As part of an interview Tuesday night with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, the Ohio Republican said, “Frankly, Laura, I would love it if Democrats were willing — you know, not that they will agree with Republicans all the time — but if they were willing to work with us on lowering housing prices, on lowering gas prices, on actually making the lives of American citizens better. You know, we could have some real bipartisan compromise. That’s not what they’re talking about.”
I realize the vice president must be very busy, but it really isn’t that difficult to keep up with the basics of current events. In this case, when Vance said Democrats are unwilling to work with Republicans on priorities such as “lowering housing prices,” he turned reality on its head. It was literally last week when Democrats offered unanimous support for a bipartisan bill to address housing prices — legislation that members such as Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts helped to write.
Democrats recognized that doing so would offer the GOP some election-season bragging rights, but Democrats did it anyway because they have prioritized governing and “actually making the lives of American citizens better” over partisan considerations.
But Vance didn’t just contradict reality; he also contradicted his boss.
Just one day before the vice president brazenly misled a national television audience, Trump was asked about the pending housing bill. “It’s very bipartisan; that means the Democrats like it,” the president saidwhile acknowledging that he hasn’t yet decided whether to sign it.
In other words, when Vance said policymakers “could have some real bipartisan compromise,” he seemed indifferent to the fact that we’ve already had some real bipartisan compromise — a detail that even Trump was willing to acknowledge a day earlier.
Whether the vice president will suffer for publicly contradicting the president remains to be seen.
Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
BELGRADE, Serbia — The nearly four-year Bosnian war in the 1990s set off a massive wave of displacement, with a third of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s pre-war population permanently leaving the country as refugees.
Team captain Edin Džeko, a 40-year-old striker who left his native Sarajevo soon after the war, has recalled playing soccer in the lulls between the daily barrage of sniper fire that defined the siege of the Bosnian capital and says he could never have imagined becoming a world-class player after watching the football pitches in his neighborhood reduced to “fields of scorched earth.”
Bosnia’s squad reflects that postwar diaspora. Left back Sead Kolašinac was born in Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1993 to a family that left after Bosnia descended into war. Right back Amar Dedić was born in Austria after his parents left northern Bosnia during the war, and midfielder Benjamin Tahirović in Sweden to refugees from besieged Sarajevo.
And then there is the so-called Milwaukee Messi: young forward Esmir Bajraktarević, who was born in a Wisconsin to parents born in the eastern town that gave its name to the Srebrenica genocide.
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