The Social World

Tag: Tucker Carlson

  • Scoop: Farage pulled out of Tucker Carlson interview

    Scoop: Farage pulled out of Tucker Carlson interview

    Is Britain’s upstart Reform party really as committed to free speech as they would have us believe? Tucker Carlson was meant to converse with leader Nigel Farage on his trip to London last week. But, Cockburn hears, Farage pulled out after the stateside controversy about Carlson’s recent choice to chat with “groyper” leader and bête noire Nick Fuentes. Who knew the leading light of the British right would be so sensitive about “platforming?” Top Farage advisor James Orr, who also serves as an Anglo-whisperer for Vice President J.D. Vance, made excuses on Reform’s behalf.

    “It’s the donors and consultants, always,” Carlson told Cockburn about the choice to pull out. “If you want to save your country, you have to ignore them.”

    Tucker’s show – the 10th most listened to in the US on Spotify this year – hosted two other Englishmen instead: ex-Reform MP Rupert Lowe, a Farage rival, and Milo Yiannopoulos, who raved about how homosexuality isn’t real. What could be more British than that?

    A freezing and fraught World Cup draw in DC

    DC’s Kennedy Center played host to the 2026 FIFA World Cup draw on Friday lunchtime. According to FIFA president and Trump fanboy Gianni Infantino, 2,000 guests from 200 countries were in the amphitheater. Not including Cockburn of course, who dodged the arctic weather to watch from his Dupont Circle manse. “You’re very lucky you skipped this,” a fellow journalist texted. “Two hours waiting on line in the freezing cold snow only to be stuffed into a media filing center where we have to watch the event on a screen. Venue apparently reserved for FIFA staff. Misery.” Cockburn imagines FIFA treats journalists a bit better than previous hosts Qatar and Russia.

    On the Fox broadcast, USMNT veteran Alexi Lalas was ranting about the prospect of England winning on American soil in the US’s 250th year. “You think they’re insufferable now?” Cockburn, due to his parentage, is pulling for Scotland – after Team USA, of course.

    The President and First Lady observed from a box as hosts Kevin Hart and Heidi Klum kicked things off. Canadian PM Mark Carney and President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico also attended. Captain America actor Danny Ramirez roamed through the crowd of soccer stars and other celebrities. Ramirez signaled out but didn’t speak to rapper Wyclef Jean – who hails from Haiti. The island nation has qualified for its second World Cup ever – but Haitians are currently banned from entering the US due to “national security risks.”

    In a highly telegraphed move, President Trump was awarded the inaugural “FIFA Peace Prize” – an invention of Infantino’s – during the ceremony. Infantino gave Trump a sculpted gold trophy, a certificate and “a beautiful medal you can wear wherever you want to go,” placing it around POTUS’s neck. The FIFA president is truly the phrase “yes sire” made flesh. Trump took the opportunity to brag about ticket sales – “The numbers are beyond anything… what Gianni thought was possible” – as well as once again branding America the “hottest country in the world” and discussing the peace deals that have been struck during his two terms. Hours before, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth tweeted, “Just sunk another narco boat.”

    The characteristically limp crowd were encouraged to “make some noise” by R&B icon Lauryn Hill before the draw began in earnest. Hockey icon Wayne Gretzky had the unfortunate task of butchering the country names of the fourth-seeded teams. The US got relatively lucky, finding themselves in a group with Australia, Paraguay and one of Kosovo, Romania, Slovakia or Turkey. The proceedings were fraught and awkward – not least when the Village People botched their entrance for “YMCA” at the end. Cockburn hopes for the sake of the President – who sat through the whole affair – that the tournament itself runs slicker.

    On our radar

    VAX AX A CDC advisory panel today dispensed with the recommendation that babies get the hepatitis B vaccine.

    X FRIENDS Vice President J.D. Vance chastised the European Union for fining Elon Musk’s X $140 million for violating the Digital Services Act.

    TUDUM Netflix announced an $82.7 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery’s studio, HBO and streaming assets.

    My bloody Valentina

    Hate has a fresh face – it’s a Latina in an orange jumpsuit. Her name is Valentina Gomez, and she’s running for Congress in Texas’s 31st district. “Vote for me so we can kick every dirty Muslim out of Texas,” she says in her latest campaign video, walking toward the camera. “Save your daughters from getting raped by a Muhammad. And protect our soldiers from getting murdered in broad daylight. Let me make very clear: we will make Texas the worst place for groomers, terrorists, Muslims, pedophiles and illegals to live in so help me God.”

    This video was considered so outrageous that Piers Morgan’s producers invited Gomez to come on his show, which has become YouTube’s answer to Jerry Springer. Morgan called her a “vile bigot” and branded her remarks “jaw-dropping bigotry” and said she could never appear on his show again. He pushed back at her claim that his producers “begged” her to appear, pointing out they only sent a single email which she accepted immediately.

    Gomez is new to the Lone Star State, having been defeated in the GOP primary for the Missouri Secretary of State race last year. Watchdog groups have tied Gomez to a “rise in anti-Muslim sentiment in Texas.” Ya think? Given that Gomez has released a video of herself burning a Qur’an, that feels somehow appropriate. Gomez repeatedly declares on X that “Jesus is King” and that her campaign is “powered by Jesus Christ,” but there’s something in the gospels about turning the other cheek. Cockburn may be something of a lapsed man, but if Texas elects this person, so help him God.

    Subscribe to Cockburn’s Diary on Substack to get it in your inbox on Tuesdays and Fridays.

  • Milo Yiannopoulos holds forth on the origins of homosexuality 

    Milo Yiannopoulos holds forth on the origins of homosexuality 

    Are we becoming “faggotized?” According to Milo Yiannopoulos “everything has gone gay” – food, music, fashion, showbiz and – significantly – politics. On a new installment of The Tucker Carlson Show the former Breitbart journalist and Kanye West consigliere set out his general theory of male homosexuality. 

    Male gayness is not something you were born with, argued Milo, but is instead a “set of behaviors” caused by something misfiring about a man’s relationship with masculinity at an early age. For this devouring mothers or “nebbish fathers” are usually to blame; indeed, much of the rest of a male gay’s life can be seen as an elaborate attempt to get revenge on the parental figure who failed them. He claimed that most gay men hate women because they hated their overbearing mothers, leading to, inter alia, the state of the fashion industry and “the intolerable ugliness of the catwalk.” 

    The ideology of neoconservatism is another epiphenomenon of this, Milo argued – hinting that for several prominent politicians foreign adventurism is a way to compensate for the powerlessness they felt at an early age. Figures such as former VP Mike Pence were at the very least “spiritually gay.” Who knows – but there certainly is an odd overrepresentation of gay men on the American right which no one has quite yet accounted for.  

    Milo relayed all this in his usual raffish way. His eyes were permanently squinted throughout, giving him the air of a wizened sage. He now claims to be living celibate as part of a years-long effort to overcome homosexuality. Over a T-shirt patterned with pictures of his face was a gold crucifix necklace. 

    Unsurprisingly for The Tucker Carlson Show the supernatural soon entered into things. Milo described being so overcome with desire after being sat next to a football player on a flight that he had to make for the bathroom for some quick onanism. “Sounds like a demon,” observed Tucker. Milo agreed, quickly christening it “Gorgoroth the Semen Demon.”

    Tucker certainly seemed to think he was speaking to a sort of Mephistopheles. “There’s no question in my mind you’re telling the truth,” he would often say, warily. At one point he furrowed his brow, “if you want to weaken a society to the point of collapse–” he began, “Faggotize it” finished Milo.

  • Goodbye to the Smoky Yolk diner

    “Actually, yes, please, I would like the pastrami corned-beef hash on the side – extra brown, extra peppers. Perfect complement to my Prime Benny. May want to hold the cheesy grits, though, but I’d love a side of maple and a large strawberry shake. Man needs his fruit!” “Whip cream?” “Oh, I think, absolutely.” It wasn’t a novel conversation. I used to entertain similar, equally weighty questions at least three times a week here. But I do recall thinking, then, and many times previously: if one is scarfing a monster shake at 7:30 on a Tuesday morning, is whipped cream really your most likely coronary catalyst? (Always skip the cherry; nothing found in nature – even adjacent to nature – can achieve such brilliant degrees of radiation red.)

    No one in diner-world cares. It’s a judgment-free zone. A celebration of freedom and options and culinary abandon. It is a perpetual carb-and-protein rush, an extravaganza of grease and oil and butter, with ample amounts of sugar in all its blissful variations. There were no scolds here. There were also no glass coffee “mugs.” No avocado toast and no burrata. Nothing was served on artisanal bread. Good luck requesting a “smoothie.” Or masala chai. Same goes for non-fat yogurt, Greek or otherwise.

    I’d never ordered a salad here, but it was certainly represented on the menu. Have faith, it wouldn’t be arugula, endive, kale or some other iceberg-usurper, the name of which is not even worth the attempt to pronounce it: it did not exist 25 years ago. Shaved radish. Bean or Brussels sprouts. Strained and extra virgin truffle oil. Balsamic “glaze.” None of these striving posers were welcomed here. No visa. No green card. Not even a day pass. Whether you were tucked away in one of the plump maroon booths that lined two long walls, or, perched, as I often was, upon one of the brown faux-leather, full-backed, boot-pegged, counter-swivel-stools, your personal cluster of spices sat before you, along with ample, and endless amounts of butter.

    This is the family-owned Smoky Yolk, in the middle of James Island, South Carolina. And, until it shuttered without warning in November, I was proud to call it my local diner. It was seemingly unchanged in the past half century, save the free WiFi, surround-sound music and habanero mustard on request. The Smoky Yolk didn’t have a website or employ a hostess. It didn’t accept Amex, ApplePay or Bitcoin. The eggs were fluffy and the bacon was crisp. The three-egg omelets were fat, half-pan crescents of ridiculous goodness and could be stuffed with any manner of protein or vegetable the mind and salivary glands could conjure, from fresh jalapeño to chorizo. Thick slabs of non-processed cheddar and Swiss were perpetually on-deck. The waffles were browned and thick, yet light and crunchy.

    Chicken and waffles were a legitimate dish here and came with a special high-heat honey mustard, as well as syrup and an angioplasty balloon (or at least they brought me one. Perhaps others had to request it). There were certainly no calorie counts. There were no handwritten menus or meticulously curlicued wall-chalk-art depicting the daily specials. On weekends, a cute teenager named Maddie – with scrubbed cheeks, athletic efficiency and the waning innocence of the barely pre-corrupted – ushered the elderly and stroller-clad families to their tables. The rest just grabbed a menu and sat themselves.

    A word about that menu: it was a thickly laminated, double-sided one-sheet and, at first glance, acceptably clean. But it was old and presumably unchanged across the decades. It had been fondled, grappled, clutched, smeared and spilled on by legions of South Carolinians and random passers-through. I often wondered if there were any cold cases in the forgotten files of the James Island homicide bureau and, if so, whether they’d ever considered subjecting the menus to forensic examination.

    Often, there were no paper towels in the bathroom dispenser. Soap either, though the floor was always clean, there was an ancient toe-to-breast American Standard, white porcelain urinal and the water in the sink flowed hard and hot – so hot, you didn’t even need soap. Dogs often joined their owners for a meal, though my own five sat in the car, too unwieldy – and pork-focused – to handle the welcoming confines of the Smoky Yolk. Instead, they waited, tense and wet-mouthed, hoping Jeremy, cheerful sous chef, would sneak them some bacon, as he often did. A small Christian cross adorned the back wall next to an American flag, weathered, but clean and untattered. Not enough politics in your life? Want some virtue-affirmation with your short stack? Sorry, kings may actually have lived here. No signs claimed otherwise. No harpy admonitions this was a “gun-free zone.” My own Kimber K6 revolver often sat snuggled in its soft case atop the counter, hardly the only firearm in evidence. This is the American South.

    There was “endless coffee,” good, and hot, served in heavy, stain-veined formerly off-white porcelain mugs, sturdy enough to brain a mouthy waiter named “Chad.” Fortunately, there were no waiters here named Chad. No waiters at all. This was strictly waitress domain. Every size, shape and age, and each possessed with the cheerful, contained, competent professionalism and dignity that used to define the American service industry. And the country. When I track the owner down to convey my obvious grief, I’m also going to inquire about that American Standard.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

  • Tucker plays the Joker to Piers Morgan

    Tucker Carlson has a favorite stage persona: the last sane man in the world, now at the end of his tether. His typical format for interviews starts with a folksy, Mr Smith Goes to Washington line of questioning, which then collapses into bitter, hysterical laughter. Episodes end up feeling like the famous police station dialogue with Heath Ledger’s Joker, with guests reduced to a discomfited Commissioner Gordon trying to maintain their poise. In yesterday’s episode of the Tucker Carlson Show the Carlson technique was used on Piers Morgan – the British former tabloid journalist and host of another popular online show, Piers Morgan Uncensored.

    The interview was an interesting clash of ideologies. Everyone knows about Carlson’s feud with the neoconservative and pro-Israel faction of the American conservative movement. But in this interview with the Fleet Street veteran Carlson decided to open up another front: against those sections of the English-speaking right for whom politics seems to be chiefly about cultural issues like transgenderism, transgender bathrooms, and the cancellations of celebrities like J.K. Rowling. Morgan set out this view of the world in a – slightly complacent – recent book, Woke is Dead. 

    In an episode framed around the decline of Britain, Piers Morgan rolled out the old favorites – like when the comedian Graham Linehan was briefly arrested by the police at London’s Heathrow Airport earlier this year for a slightly bolshy X post about transgender men. Tucker wasn’t interested. These kinds of laws were obviously crazy, Tucker said, but do they really matter when London is now only 36% White British? 

    Piers demurred, and that’s when the hysterical laughter started. There was an unedifying segment in which Tucker tried to get Piers to say “faggot” out loud, which was then followed by an extended discourse on whether homosexuality was something you were born with. For his part Piers was reduced to various Keir Starmer-isms about how London was more or less fine because “top pubs” were still serving up “over 20,000 Guinnesses” to paying customers. Tucker Carlson’s new ability to set the terms of debate in the American right is certainly a major achievement; yet managing to turn an incorrigible shock-jock and outrage merchant like Piers Morgan into a bemused moderate is surely another.

  • Is MAGA cracking up?

    Is MAGA cracking up?

    In the year since his triumphant reelection, Donald Trump has racked up an enormous list of accomplishments, both foreign and domestic. His sweeping, “move fast and break things” approach to governance has generated a form of accepted normalcy which his first administration never experienced.

    His White House staff and cabinet, once full of leaks and disloyalty, has turned out to be incredibly faithful. On the international scene, he has credibly been suggested as deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize. And at home, according to polling averages from RealClearPolitics, Trump is more popular at this point in his second term than either George W. Bush or Barack Obama was.

    Yet within the movement that made all this possible, it seems everyone is at each other’s throats. The long knives are out for people not on the left, but inside the big tent that Trump built. It’s not just a hierarchical fight between social and fiscal conservatives, insiders vs outsiders. It’s MAHA moms and tech giants; tariff lovers and haters; the Wall Street Journal vs the Heritage Foundation; Candace Owens vs Turning Point USA; Megyn Kelly vs based icon Sydney Sweeney; comic Dave Smith vs the Babylon Bee; Ben Shapiro vs Tucker Carlson; and Tucker vs, well, pretty much everyone on Fox News and most people who aren’t. It’s the most vicious, catty, well-coiffed and fully botoxed melee since Anchorman, and no one knows where Marjorie Taylor Greene found that hand grenade.

    The question on the mind of every Republican in Washington: are we witnessing the great MAGA crack-up? And the answer is: almost certainly yes.

    The insiders always knew it was too good to last. Trump’s remarkable political skill is in identifying the one issue that cuts across natural partisan tendencies to create a coalition that seemed incompatible. He won over the broad ethnic working-class coalition that supported him in 2024. He also scooped up the votes of those who wanted crackdowns on crime and those who want nonviolent offenders freed, of drug legalizers and vaccine skeptics, pro-natalists and crypto bros, supply siders and trade hawks, pastors and porn stars.

    “Trump is so unique of a political figure, when he’s focused on governing, it’s actually time that daddy is spending away from the kids,” says one longtime GOP insider. “He brings back gifts whenever he comes back from one of his trips, but while he’s away at work or just not paying attention to us, we scrap like cats and dogs and start every day with bruises on our shins.”

    The fights often take place on X – the site where everything is happening, which for many on the right these days seems to make everything about Israel, all the time. Ongoing squabbles can become so internecine as to be more difficult to follow than the plots of prestige TV shows. The strife is often colored by personal relationships: former employees feuding with past bosses or personnel fights with gripes held over from the first Trump term, or the different responses to January 6. This stretches all the way up to the President himself, who refused to endorse his former critic, Virginia Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears, in the state’s recent gubernatorial race. It might not have made a difference, given her double-digit failure at the polls. But it was still a reminder that old wounds linger.

    On the surface, the MAGA cohort should be enormously pleased with how things are going, even despite the Democratic success in the off-year elections. Yet rumbling underneath, multiple asymmetric fights are being waged, all of which can be viewed through the lens of who is up or down in controlling and directing the next generation of MAGA. Typically, conflicts of this nature are based on which ideological faction supports whom as the next presidential candidate. But in the case of the current fracas, such lines are often unclear. With even Marco Rubio reportedly acknowledging that J.D. Vance is the frontrunner for the 2028 Republican nomination, there isn’t really a competing candidate coalescing support for an uphill run… yet.

    The Heritage Foundation’s struggles in this moment are a microcosm of the crackup’s tangled motivations. The story goes like this: in the aftermath of the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk in September, a violent moment that both unified and depressed the coalition of the right, various figures began to position themselves to inherit all – or a portion – of Kirk’s role as the titular leader of the younger MAGA base.

    It quickly became clear that this was about more than just reaching right-leaning college students and that it actually reflected competing visions about both Kirk’s and Turning Point’s attitudes toward Israel and anti-Semitism. Fights and arguments conducted via text messages and DMs spilled out into the open, with some conspiratorially minded figures claiming (without any evidence) that Kirk was actually assassinated over his shifting views on the subject. No personality exploited this moment more than Carlson, whose appearance as a speaker at Kirk’s memorial event included him comparing the young activist’s murder to the death of Jesus Christ. He invited the audience to “picture the scene in a lamp-lit room with a bunch of guys sitting around eating hummus,” painting the hummus-eaters as the ones who engineered the crucifixion. As he typically does, Carlson pretended the suggestion of anything untoward about his anecdote was ridiculous. But afterwards he brought a longtime Kirk antagonist, the aggressively misogynist and racist troll Nick Fuentes, onto his show for what essentially amounted to a softball promotional interview.

    The interview broke something open. Conservatives already uncomfortable with Carlson’s pro-Russia and Qatar-spinning tendencies turned on him. This turned explosive when the leadership of Heritage, the central think tank for American conservatism and the creator of the Project 2025 agenda that has guided much of Trump’s second term, decided to weigh in on Carlson’s side. Heritage president Kevin Roberts released a video defending the broadcaster, claiming that “we will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda,” and that “conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class or from their mouthpieces in Washington.” He denounced Carlson’s critics as a “venomous coalition” and suggested that criticism of the Fuentes interview amounted to an attempt at cancellation.

    The statement prompted widespread condemnation. Texas Senator Ted Cruz denounced it, conservative publications and op-ed pages decried it, long-tenured scholars resigned from the think tank, Heritage’s dedicated committee to tackle anti-Semitism considered assigning staffers to observe Shabbat. Ultimately, Roberts’s chief of staff took the fall and left his post. Roberts himself was compelled to hold a lengthy apology session. In the face of calls for his resignation, he held on to his position with the mantra: “I made the mess; let me clean it up.”

    At that session, a young female staffer provided a view of why that “mess” happened in the first place, standing up to say: “I condemn Nick Fuentes’s hateful rhetoric. That being said, I would like to point out that some of the most vocal people against Tucker Carlson have been calling him an anti-Semite since he started to hold more anti-interventionalist views. A handful of young colleagues and I had no issue with the points you made in the original video… Gen Z has an increasingly unfavorable view of Israel – and it’s not because millions of Americans are anti-Semitic. It’s because we are Catholic and Orthodox and believe that Christian Zionism is a modern heresy… as a young person, many of us are generally tired of foreign entanglements, while our problems in this country worsen.”

    While the old guard GOP might like it to be otherwise, the young staffer speaks for a growing number of solid MAGA voters who have become frustrated with the state of things. In a cycle when Democrats are embracing a political message emphasizing “affordability” and Trump seems to be spending outsized time on legacy-building projects instead of addressing the problems of inflation and growth, even some of his most loyal supporters are beginning to sound like critics. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Representative who became the first Republican to call Israel’s actions in Gaza “genocide,” has become the recipient of a dramatic degree of strange new respect from everyone from Wolf Blitzer to Bill Maher to the harridans of The View. Her message is essentially that America’s leaders are spending too much time looking at other people’s problems and need to get back to focusing on their own. The critique is clearly aimed at Trump and those around him: the Donald’s focus has been decidedly more international in recent months.

    It’s hard not to see this as sour grapes from supporters who expected a different Trump 2.0 than they are getting. As author James Kirchick summarized in the Washington Post: “Though Trump campaigned as an isolationist, he has certainly not governed as one. He has recently pulled a U-turn on Ukraine, imposing fresh sanctions on Moscow and calling off a proposed summit with Putin in Budapest. Trump is also ramping up action against Venezuela, citing dubious legal pretext to launch airstrikes against alleged drug boats in the Caribbean Sea and amassing military assets off the country’s coast for a possible attack on the mainland. And with Operation Midnight Hammer, he joined the Israeli assault on Iran’s nuclear program. Even in symbolic ways, like changing the Defense Department’s name to the War Department, Trump has taken American foreign policy in a more interventionist, even bellicose direction.”

    When Trump was making the decision to attack Iran in the summer and Carlson intoned, publicly, that such a strike would be likely to spark World War Three, the President responded by noting that he alone decides what “America First” means. The central question for the MAGA coalition is now who, once Trump is no longer behind the Resolute Desk, gets to decide what America First means?

    For Vance, the man who seems likeliest to inherit that role, there seems to be recognition that things aren’t headed in the right direction. “We need to focus on the home front,” the Vice-President tweeted in response to the electoral drubbing the Republican party received earlier this month. “The infighting is stupid. I care about my fellow citizens – particularly young Americans – being able to afford a decent life, I care about immigration and our sovereignty and I care about establishing peace overseas so our resources can be focused at home. If you care about those things too, let’s work together.”

    Whether Vance can hold things together through this moment of crack-up could determine whether this coalition, forged originally by Trump’s political ingenuity and force of will, can endure beyond the man himself.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

  • The bonfire of the New Right’s vanities

    The bonfire of the New Right’s vanities

    The American right has a problem: it can’t stop talking about itself. Commentators, academics and journalists of what used to be called a “conservative” persuasion all tend to think that their ideas are tremendously interesting. And, in the way a difficult child becomes argumentative when he or she isn’t getting attention, they fight. They fear irrelevance and so they fall out with each other and take sides in order to prove to themselves that they have something worth saying. Things become messy and nasty and everybody gets carried away – usually in the hope of grabbing their own slice of an all-too easily distracted online audience. (Why else am I writing this?)

    Today we see the quarrelsome tendency of the so-called “New Right” at work in the squabbles over Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, Kevin Roberts, Nick Fuentes and whether it’s OK to praise Hitler.

    But we also saw it six years ago, in the so-famous-it’s-now-largely-forgotten debate between David French and Sohrab Ahmari in 2019. This was a curious clash between two highly intelligent men which took place in the months before a global pandemic shook the world. The French vs Ahmari argument was over big ideas: the First Amendment and the culture wars, jurisprudence and liberty, the free market and nationalism, technocracy, Catholicism and family values. The title of the actual debate, hosted at the Catholic University of America and moderated by the New York Times’s Ross Douthat, was “What is Integralism now?” (Put that question in your Chestertonian pipe and smoke it, you beta cuck.)

    It was also about manners. Should conservatives keep upholding the importance of civility and lose? Or be as vicious as the left and win? Ahmari, representing the emergent “post-liberal” consensus, was on Team Rude. There could be “no polite, David French-ian third way around the cultural civil war,” he said. “The only way is through.” And at the time that seemed to be a clinching argument. French, a NeverTrumper, represented the tired and failed politics of the George W. Bush era. Few wanted to hear his equivocations when #MeToo was still empowering a particularly virulent form of feminism and controversies over “drag-queen story hour” were being were lost.

    But, boy oh boy, what a boreathon did Sohrab cause! For weeks, right-of-center pundits continued to weigh in on whether they were Frenchist or Ahmarite. Most commentators waffled out a third-way of saying there is no third-way: French was wrong, yes, but conservatives should not necessarily embrace the Jacobite tendencies of the MAGA fringe. Ergo, facto, propter, hoc.

    Then came 2020 – Covid, Black Lives Matter, peak woke, a contested election – and conservatives became increasingly radical. The left really was evil and needed to be smashed. Right-wingers started talking confidently about a “reverse march through in the institutions.” By the time of Trump’s reelection last year, and in the dizzying first months of his second administration, the New Right’s triumph seemed complete. J.D. Vance, who espoused the “paleo” or “post-liberal” worldview so eloquently, became Vice President. From day one, the Trump-Vance administration went to war with DEI and Harvard and anybody else who stood in the way. And on Liberation Day, Trump ignored the bleating of the free marketeers and upended the global financial status quo in favour of protection.

    But the David Frenches of this world never quite went away. They merely licked their wounds. And now, amid the agonized infighting over Tucker Carlson’s decision to interview the Groyper-in-Chief Nick Fuentes, they are attempting to exact their oh-so-civilized revenge.

    At the think-tanks, with all those nervous donors, the knives are out. Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, at first defended Carlson. Then, under pressure, he performed a spectacular reverse-ferret and groveled.

    On Friday, Christopher Long and Thomas Lynch, the former president and chairman of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, resigned from the board in disgust at what they called the “post-liberal hijacking” of their influential non-profit. In an “Open Letter to the Conservative Movement,” Long and Lynch denounced ISI’s current president, Johnny Burtka, for his “no enemies to the right” leadership, for indulging the “media crank Tucker Carlson,” the “postliberal icon Patrick Deneen,” the “neoreactionary Curtis Yarvin” and “others who seek to undermine the liberal ideas of the American Founding.” They denounced ISI’s Project Cosmos podcast for pandering to the “Yarvin-Fuentes-Carlson echo chamber”.

    What Long and Lynch conveniently ignored is that Nick Fuentes in fact loathes Curtis Yarvin, whom he regards as a sort of controlled-opposition agent for organized Jewry. But who cares about logic when you’ve decided that you are defending America’s founding?

    David French isn’t failing to seize the moment. “Once you’ve demolished respect for liberal democracy and demolished real value in rectitude and character in public life, it’s a short trip nihilism and fascism,” he declared on X, displaying something of a Cassandra complex.

    Again, several barrages of other conservative media voices have taken to social media to clarify the position of their own bright minds in this celestial constellation of 21st century intellectualism. “No, the post-liberals aren’t solely responsible for the Groyper moment,” intoned the former National Review columnist Jonah Goldberg. “But the claim that they didn’t help… to get us to this point is such obvious contrafactual nonsense.”

    In reply, various new-right influencers, who’ve been carefully building their large and “based” audiences for a long time, have taken to bemoaning all the fractiousness while pining for that recently lost voice of reason, the murder victim Charlie Kirk. As the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh put it, “everything that’s happened over the past two months has signalled to the left that assassinations work. Take out one of our leaders ands we’ll start eating each other.”

    As ever in American conservatism, there’s masses of grandstanding and sentimentality covering over the more instinctive vanity and self-preservation. It’s exhausting. I love American conservatives, and it’s a sign of a vigorous culture, I suppose, to treat ideas and principles as worth fighting for. But is it really necessary for everyone to take themselves so seriously? Surely the most conservative insight of all came from that limey Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, who said: “Nothing matters very much and few things matter at all.”

  • The attack on the Heritage Foundation is an attack on MAGA

    It’s Thursday morning as I write. Has The Wall Street Journal weighed in with another attack on Kevin Roberts yet, the besieged president of the Heritage Foundation? No? Be patient. It’s early hours yet. Another fusillade is due any minute. 

    I have written about that tempest-in-a-teapot myself. I agree that Roberts’s brief video statement defending the Heritage Foundation’s friendship with Tucker Carlson was ill-advised. I say why in that column. I also think that his efforts at damage control have been ineffective. But given the incontinent fury of the response to that two-minute and thirty-nine-second video, I am not sure that anyone could have calmed the storm.  

    The more the mob rages, however, the more I suspect that – to adapt a famous saying of Saul Alinsky– the issue is not the issue. It’s not really Tucker Carlson and his curious ideas about chem trails, Area 51, the baddies in World II, or the state of Israel. It’s not even Nick Fuentes, the hectoring twenty-seven-year-old anti-Semite and political performance artist whom Carlson recently treated to a long and pillow-plump interview.  

    The key that unlocks the agenda in this controversy is contained in the phrase “proxy war.” The prime targets are not Kevin Roberts or Tucker Carlson.  They are expendable cutouts for the real villain, the Make America Great Agenda of Donald Trump.  

    This is something that John Daniel Davidson touches on in a recent column in The Federalist. “Genuine concern about anti-Semitism on the right is being hijacked by neocons to attack J.D. Vance in hopes of retaking control of the GOP.”

    Oh, for the days of George Bush and Mitt Romney! Can we get them back?  Only a few days ago, it was reported that Mike Pence is tanned, rested, and ready for 2028. 

    We can draw a veil over that particular farce. Rest assured, Mike Pence will not be moralizing from the White House. But what entities like The Wall Street Journal long for is a return to a Pence-like “normality” and “Conservative, Inc.” The deep state missed taking down Trump when he ran in 2016. He was supposed to be toast, but somehow he prevailed. Then the Russia Collusion delusion was supposed to destroy him but failed. Then, when the 2024 election lumbered into sight, the establishment thought it had mounted a devastating first strike against Trump and his populist agenda. Jack Smith, Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, Fanny Willis, ninety-something indictments partisan judges and lawfare as far as the eye could see. Amazingly, it didn’t work.

    Now those forces are piggy-backing on the campaign against anti-Semitism to take more shots against MAGA. The ironies abound.  For one thing, when it comes to anti-Semitism, the Heritage Foundation under Kevin Roberts has been close to a model citizen. You haven’t heard that in the many attacks on Roberts, but it is true. The case was well put by Victoria Coates, a Heritage scholar and national security expert, in a letter the WSJ deigned to publish on November 6 under the title “Heritage Always Stands Against Anti-Semitism.”  

    The prime targets are not Kevin Roberts or Tucker Carlson.  They are expendable cutouts for the real villain, the Make America Great Agenda of Donald Trump.  

    “In the days after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel,” Coates notes, “Heritage hosted one of the first public events to condemn the terrorism and the blatant anti-Semitism it unleashed.”

    “Shortly thereafter we created the National Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism to help coordinate the efforts of like-minded organizations.

    In October 2024, we launched Project Esther, an initiative to combat anti-Semitism in the U.S. through legal and legislative remedies. This effort has found allies across the political spectrum and raised awareness among the general public and the Trump administration of the immediate threat that left-wing anti-Semitism poses to America’s Jews and the US… The Davis Institute for National Security, which I lead, focuses on defeating antisemitism, as do our colleagues in the domestic-policy and legal departments.”

    Coates, I should add, is the author of The Battle for the Jewish State: How Israel and America Can Win, which I recently published at Encounter Books.  

    There is a certain grubby pleasure in identifying a candidate for ostracism and then joining the crowd in shouting an approved list of imprecations. This is especially true when an adjacent issue provides moral cover, as the charge of antisemitism does here. 

    Hannah Arendt noted in The Origins of Totalitarianism, the growth of anti-Semitism in a society is always a bad sign, a canary in the mine of social and political comity. The oddity in this case is that Kevin Roberts, far from approving or abetting anti-Semitism, has been exemplary in attacking it. 

  • The Heritage Foundation’s exodus of experts

    The Heritage Foundation’s exodus of experts

    Under Kevin D. Roberts, the Heritage Foundation is unraveling the remarkable legacy Edwin Feulner built. Once known as “the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement,” Heritage’s moral and philosophical clarity has yielded to confusion, populism and personality-driven politics. The damage to Heritage’s mission and credibility is becoming irreparable.

    Much of the recent outcry focuses on Roberts’s decision to maintain Heritage’s partnership with Tucker Carlson after Carlson’s now-infamous interview with Holocaust-denier Nick Fuentes. During that exchange, Carlson ridiculed Christians who affirm the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland, sneering that figures such as Ambassador Mike Huckabee and Senator Ted Cruz were “seized by this brain virus.” He derided Christian Zionism as “heresy” and declared, “I dislike them more than anybody.” Carlson even proposed stripping US citizenship from young Americans serving in the Israel Defense Forces.

    The record is long and damning. In March 2025, Carlson hosted Qatar’s prime minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, who defended his regime’s financial support for Hamas as a “mediation tool.” Carlson offered virtually no challenge. In February 2024, he traveled to Moscow to interview Vladimir Putin, allowing the Russian dictator to justify his invasion of Ukraine as a response to NATO expansion and to describe Ukraine as “an artificial state.” Carlson listened approvingly. In July 2025, he sat down with Iran’s president Masoud Pezeshkian, who denied nuclear ambitions and whitewashed his regime’s repression.Rather than condemn Carlson’s antisemitic tirades, Roberts chose to defend him – blaming “the globalist class” and “their mouthpieces in Washington” for supposedly forcing conservatives to “reflexively support” Israel. He dismissed those alarmed by Carlson’s anti-Semitic rhetoric as part of a “venomous coalition.” This is not an isolated misstep. For years, Roberts has aligned Heritage with Carlson even as the broadcaster has platformed dictators, historical revisionists and antisemites hostile to American interests and values.

    Equally revealing is Roberts’s claim that he doesn’t keep up with Carlson’s content because of his sports-viewing habits – as if ignorance excused negligence. A CEO who neglected developments in his own industry would be dismissed. The Heritage board’s duty of care requires ensuring that its president is informed and aligned with the organization’s founding principles.

    This builds on other troubling decisions by Roberts threatening the reputation of the institution. Its sprawling “Project 2025” document places pro-market and interventionist ideas side by side, creating ideological confusion rather than clarity. Even more troubling, Roberts has weaponized Heritage’s “one-voice” policy to pressure fellows to remove social-media posts defending capitalism or criticizing unconstitutional executive overreach. In doing so, he has effectively “canceled” Heritage’s own scholars.

    Under Roberts, Heritage has abandoned much of the philosophical fusionism that once defined modern conservatism: the Reagan-era synthesis of free markets, social conservatism and a strong national defense. Roberts’s Heritage now flirts with tariffs, industrial policy and even capital controls – positions antithetical to economic freedom. He condemned tariff critics as “globalist elites” and celebrated Trump-era protectionism as a “tool of statecraft.” That is a sharp break from the tradition that rightfully regards economic liberty as inseparable from political liberty. Roberts threatens to replace Reagan conservatism with Buchanan’s nativism, protectionism, isolationism and central planning.

    The exodus of respected experts on free trade, financial regulation and macroeconomics, international relations and first principles speaks volumes. Their departures symbolize not only a collapse of institutional expertise but the silencing of the intellectual backbone that once made Heritage formidable. Meanwhile, Kevin Roberts hired Mario Enzler, who was forced to resign as Dean of the St. Augustine Business School after the university became aware of multiple falsified academic degrees. Roberts also hired Mark Meador, a critic of both the “consumer-welfare” antitrust standard and the esteemed Judge Robert Bork who championed it.

    Roberts proudly claims he “does not take direction from members or donors.” In the corporate world, a CEO with such arrogance would face swift action from the board and shareholders. Roberts’ alliances and rhetoric have damaged Heritage’s reputation and alienated its donor base. He is using Heritage as a personal platform for ideological experimentation and personal self-aggrandizement.

    Donors have entrusted Heritage with hundreds of millions of dollars, often through endowments meant to safeguard Western civilization and the US-Israel alliance. Those intentions deserve respect, not betrayal.

    A continued institutional alliance between Heritage and Tucker Carlson normalizes the antisemitism promoted weekly on Tucker’s show. It’s for this reason leading members of the National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism (NTFCA) publicly announced their departures from this Heritage project including Combat Antisemitism Movement, Young Jewish Conservatives, Coalition of Jewish Values, ZOA and the Israel Innovation Fund. The loss of the organization’s moral and intellectual capital under Kevin Roberts is increasingly clear.

    The Heritage Foundation once stood as a bulwark of principled conservatism by confronting Soviet tyranny, championing tax reform and deregulation, and defending the Judeo-Christian roots of Western civilization. Today, Kevin Roberts aligns Heritage with a demagogue who flatters dictators and scorns allies, and he muzzles Heritage fellows from speaking out. In so doing, Roberts is dismantling not just a think tank’s reputation but a generation’s work of conservative institution building.


  • The sinister rise of Churchill revisionism

    The sinister rise of Churchill revisionism

    Winston Churchill is one of Britain’s enduring symbols. His relentless drive, deep conviction and steadfast leadership means that he remains admired by millions around the globe. Yet for years, the political mainstream has been compelled to defend his memory from spurious attacks from the left, such as the British politician John McDonnell calling him a “villain.” Depressingly that threat – and the same pernicious desire to denigrate one of the West’s greatest heroes – can now be found on the right.

    Spawned from a sinister fringe of the ultra-MAGA movement, these views have been propagated to millions. Tucker Carlson hosted the pseudo-historian Darryl Cooper on his podcast in an episode that has attracted over 33 million downloads. Cooper made a series of absurd and ahistorical claims – including that Churchill was “the chief villain” of World War Two – while actively downplaying Nazi atrocities in eastern Europe.

    Carlson and Cooper are not alone. Major figures of the US online right, from Candace Owens to Dave Smith, have either backed Cooper or engaged in their own rewriting of the history of World War Two. Grokipedia, Elon Musk’s new AI alternative to Wikipedia, has an entry on Sir Oswald Mosley which states that “recent reappraisals” have validated his “policy prescience.” Mosley was the leader of the British Union of Fascists; the clue to his policy ideas are obvious in the name of his organization.

    Sadly, such revisionism is not confined to the United States. A new online fringe in Britain – from former Reform UK party candidate Ian Gribbin and party advisor Jack Anderton, to the popular contrarian podcast Lotus Eaters – have dabbled in revisionism of Churchill’s life, actions and legacy from an ultra-right perspective, essentially arguing that Britain should not have fought in World War Two. Of course, such views have been expressed in the past by Pat Buchanan, Alan Clark, John Charmley, David Irving and even Maurice Cowling, but were always niche. Today they are turbo-charged by tens of millions of people on social media. This new strain of ahistorical US-led Churchill skepticism must not be allowed to establish a bridgehead in British politics.

    As my and Zachary Marsh’s new report for Policy Exchange, “Defender of the West,” argues, these critiques consistently misrepresent or manipulate the historical record to present myths about Churchill as fact, such as that he was behind the decision to offer a guarantee to Poland in April 1939, when in fact he was a backbench MP and in no decision-making role. (Nonetheless it was the correct decision of Neville Chamberlain’s government.) Or that it was Churchill who initiated civilian bombing raids, despite the fact that they had been a central part of Nazi military strategy since Guernica in the Spanish Civil War.

    The repeated assertion by these critics that Churchill’s “warmongering” sustained an unwinnable war – forgetting it seems, that the Allies ultimately triumphed – is intended to suggest that Britain should instead have made peace with Hitler in 1940. Yet Hitler routinely breached every single agreement he ever signed, from the Munich Agreement to the Anglo-Germany Navy Treaty to the Nazi Soviet Pact. That he could be trusted to leave Britain and her empire alone is of the same naïve school of appeasement that Churchill himself rightly fought throughout the 1930s. He understood that a European continent dominated by any power – and particularly by Nazi Germany – was incompatible with Britain’s international interests as much as her values. Lebensraum did not just apply to the east.

    Rebutting Churchill revisionism is not only important for protecting the principles of good scholarship and evidence within the academy, but is also essential because this transatlantic fringe is determined to expand its influence over insurgent right-wing populism both in America and Europe. In doing so, the aim is not simply to manipulate the public’s view of Churchill, but through his denigration to create the intellectual space for their other pernicious ideas to flourish, specifically that isolationism and nativism should triumph over internationalism and interventionism.

    By blackening Churchill’s name (and of course that of President Franklin Roosevelt), the ultra-MAGA ideologues, several of whom have been disavowed by President Trump himself, hope to damage the cause of anti-totalitarianism more widely, to the benefit to Vladimir Putin. The attack on Churchill is not just an ivory tower spat; it is profoundly connected to calls for the West to rip up the postwar international order that Churchill helped build.

    In recent weeks, most notably with the fallout from Tucker Carlson’s interview with the foul Nick Fuentes, fueling civil war in MAGA-land and at the influential Heritage Foundation – where I have given speeches in the past – we have seen how this same fringe has embraced anti-Semitic and white supremacist rhetoric. These views are infused with admiration for the authoritarian strongmen who would thrive in a world where countries like Britain and the United States abrogated their responsibilities towards smaller democracies. Gribbin, whilst standing for Reform UK in 2024, even combined his criticism of Churchill with praise for Putin, saying, “If only the West had politicians of his class.”

    Historical debate and discussion of the merits of western internationalism are necessary and healthy for our discourse. Yet they must be routed in facts, evidence and made in good faith. These attacks on Churchill, the greatest Briton, seek to present the United Kingdom’s sacrifice and achievements in World War Two as an entirely pointless endeavor, which justifies a new isolationism. Rational, decent, conservative-minded people of all parties and movements should be steadfast in rejecting such dangerous ahistorical rubbish. 

    Lord Roberts of Belgravia is the co-author of Policy Exchange’s new report: “Defender of the West: A response to attacks on Churchill’s life and legacy”

  • Is Trump becoming a lame duck?

    Is Trump becoming a lame duck?

    No sooner did Democrats in the Senate reach a deal to end the federal government shutdown than a frenzy of liberal pearl clutching ensued. The Democrats should have held out longer, they argued. Healthcare subsidies could have been rescued. Donald Trump’s approval ratings were plunging. Golly, maybe the Democrats could even have driven the dreaded Trump from office? Jonathan Chait’s verdict in the Atlantic was not untypical: “Senate Democrats just made a huge mistake.”

    Don’t believe a word of it. The surprising thing isn’t that Democrats folded. It’s that they held out as long as they did. In the end, the moderate Democratic Senators, ranging from Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman to Nevada’s Catherine Cortez Masto, made the right call. Here’s the deal: ending the government shutdown puts the focus back squarely on Trump – and his failure to deal with a faltering economy and rising healthcare costs. Add in the fact that the Epstein files will now likely be released as the House of Representatives goes back into session and you have turbulent political seas awaiting Trump. Can the President safely steer his administration through them?

    Some of Trump’s key supporters are starting to get queasy. Exhibit A is a fiery excoriation from Sunday night on X issued by one of the President’s most prominent supporters in the Maga media – Sean Davis, the co-founder of the Federalist. After contending that congressional Republicans have no real accomplishments or plans, Davis laid into someone who is usually exempted from such criticisms by MAGA world: Trump himself. According to Davis: “Trump needs to ditch the foreign policy crap and focus all his attention on the domestic economy, which is still not working for the majority of people. Right now he looks weak and rudderless. Be mad all you want, but it’s the truth.”

    The truth is that Trump has in many ways become a foreign policy president. He’s been hosting a stream of foreign visitors, including from Central Asia this past week. He’s also handed out a $40 billion subvention to his Argentine chum Javier Milei, while failing to assist farmers in America who have been whacked by his tariffs. Instead, he’s engaged in happy talk about how prosperity is just around the corner. As Davis observed: “Newly minted college grads can’t find work and are saddled with debt. Where is their path to the American dream right now? Who is giving them a vision of a future worth fighting for?”

    This past weekend, I spoke with a mother whose 24-year-old son earned double degrees in mathematics and computer science and is now living in Manhattan – where he works as a rock-climbing instructor and scrapes by living in an efficiency apartment that costs $2,400 a month to rent. Small wonder that a socialist like Zohran Mamdani cruised to victory as mayor of New York.

    For his part, Trump appears to be living increasingly in the past. He dozed off in the Oval Office three days ago. Now his latest move is to preemptively pardon 77 of his supporters, including former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and lawyer John Eastman, for their support of his efforts to upend the 2020 presidential election. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt declared, “President Trump is putting an end to the Biden regime’s communist tactics once and for all.”

    Hmm. Actually, it is figures on the right who are starting to sound the red alert. On the RealClear Politics news site, for example, Hoover Institution fellow Peter Berkowitz warned that the kerfuffle over the Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts’ defense of Tucker Carlson for interviewing the Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes could damage the conservative cause. According to Berkowitz: “Tucker Carlson’s cozying up to Holocaust downplayers, Nazi apologists, Stalin enthusiasts, and rank anti-Semites – along with Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’ October 30 insistence that conservatism’s big tent is big enough to embrace those who hate Jews and fawn over murderous tyrants – widened a parlous rift on the right.”

    Internal fights are one thing. But the economy is what could take down a president who declared in his second inaugural speech that he would usher in nothing less than a triumphant new golden age in America. With the Supreme Court poised to strike down his tariffs, Trump is starting to look like a lame duck and the 2026 midterm elections loom larger than ever. As the government reopens, the battle between Trump and the Democrats may only have begun.