Courtesy | The Tucker Carlson Show

Dec. 18 is an “important date” for Nick Fuentes.

“That’s Joseph Stalin’s birthday,” Fuentes said in a podcast with Tucker Carlson released Oct. 27. “I’m a fan.”

“You’re a fan of Stalin’s?” Carlson asked.

“Always an admirer,” Fuentes replied.

“We’ll circle back to that,” Carlson said. He never did.

That moment represents much of Carlson’s friendly interview with Fuentes. The avowed Stalin and Hitler apologist called “organized Jewry” the “big challenge” to unifying the country and blamed “these Zionist Jews” for thwarting the American right’s political success.

Many of my fellow Hillsdale students — including some friends — listen to Tucker Carlson regularly. They tell me they appreciate how he challenges longtime, “establishment” conservative positions, such as U.S. aid to Israel. Carlson is entitled to free speech protected by the First Amendment, and no conservative I know is calling for his podcast to be taken down from YouTube. But, after this interview, he doesn’t deserve your trust or a place in the conservative movement.

The best way to deal with bad ideas is to challenge them with hard questions and better arguments. But Carlson failed to do either. What kind of interviewer doesn’t offer a follow-up to “I admire Stalin”?

Carlson, at times, tried to reel Fuentes back in. But what could be seen as “pushback” felt more like an attempt to make Fuentes look more moderate than he is. Carlson proposes that Christians are called to love all people and judge them as individuals.

“I agree,” Fuentes responds. “But” — and there’s always a “but” — “I guess the disagreement is you say identity politics is a bad thing. I think identity is reality.”

Admiration for Stalin, the Soviet leader who was responsible for the deaths of an estimated 20 million people, is one of his many fascinations.

On Jim Crow, in 2019: “It was better for them. It was better for us. It was better in general.”

He compared the Holocaust, which murdered six million Jews, to baking cookies: “Six million cookies? I’m not buying it,” he said in 2019.

But, for a moment, put aside the moral issues with Carlson’s fluffing of Fuentes. Americans won’t stand for railing against “organized Jewry.” Conservatives who think Jew-hatred deserves a place in the mainstream American right are doomed — and deserve to lose.

Thomas McKenna is a senior studying political economy.