MAGA influencer Ben Shapiro criticized Tucker Carlson, calling him a "terrible friend," "intellectual coward," and “dishonest interlocutor,” as a MAGA feud heats up over the podcast host's decision to interview self-described white nationalist Nick Fuentes.
In his show on Monday, called “Tucker Carlson Sabotages America,” Shapiro said his friendship with the former Fox News anchor was over. He referred to how Tucker "decided that it was important not only to host 27-year-old Fuentes, but smooth over his views, water them down and make them far more palatable to a normal audience," The Daily Beast reports.
Shapiro shared clips from Fuentes and his shocking comments, including “a lot of women want to be raped" or that women shouldn't be in politics. He called Fuentes a "Hitler admirer" and "Holocaust denier," who spoke in favor of Jim Crow laws, saying the racist policies were "better for us."
Shapiro dedicated his entire show to calling out Carlson and "the twisted mind" of Fuentes.
“The issue here isn’t that Tucker Carlson had Nick Fuentes on his show last week,” Shapiro said. “He has every right to do that, of course. The issue here is that Tucker Carlson decided to normalize and fluff Nick Fuentes, and that the [Project 2025 authoring] Heritage Foundation then decided to robustly defend that performance.”
“Nick Fuentes’ philosophy is not fully formed,” Shapiro said. “It’s an incoherent stew of malignity, but that’s where Tucker Carlson enters the story. Now, since his exit from Fox News in 2023, when, of course, he was a very, very popular host, Tucker Carlson has turned himself into a conspiracist and a crank and a pathological liar.”
Some right-wing MAGA followers have denounced Carlson's decision, including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).
“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.