Yesterday, Megyn Kelly did an interview with Tucker Carlson where she specifically asked and challenged him about his decision to interview Nick Fuentes. Kelly is clearly friends with Carlson and wanted to give him a chance to clear the air on this topic. As I described here, Carlson mostly brushed off his critics saying, "You know, do your own interview the way you want to do it. You're not my editor. Buzz off." Toward the very end of that discussion, Carlson did admit that maybe he'd made a mistake by not bringing up Fuentes' racist attack on his friend Usha Vance.
Today, Kelly followed that with a similar interview with Ben Shapiro. Once again, the topic was the Carlson interview with Nick Fuentes and once again it was clear that Kelly is personally friends with Shapiro and also wanted him to have his say.
The full segment is about 12 minutes long and, more so than she did yesterday, Kelly introduced Fuentes as someone who has been particularly aggressive in his attacks on Ben Shapiro. She showed a clip of Fuentes playing GTA in which, after gunning down and running over a character in the game, Fuentes said he'd just encountered Ben Shapiro.
Shapiro called Fuentes a "Hitler loving troll" and then made a short version of the argument he made at length here. Basically, he says Carlson treated Fuentes with kid gloves, failing to challenge him on anything he'd said in the past (which Carlson admitted yesterday was true) and instead trying to launder his views and make them look much more mainstream than they really are.
One of the things Shapiro said is that, on a personal level, he's always liked Tucker. He revealed that even recently they were discussing a way to get together to oppose the DSA/Mamdani agenda. But after talking about it, nothing every came from it. As Shapiro describes it, Carlson just sort of ghosted him.
In the midst of this, Shapiro brought up Candace Owens and suggested he and Kelly had a different approach to her. "I think that what Candace Owens is doing right now is evil," Shapiro said. This brought a cheer from the crowd.
"My position is it's really none of my business," Kelly replied.
"Why is it none of your business?" Shapiro asked.
"I'm not mother of the internet," Kelly said.
"But if this were on the left and somebody were accusing Charlie Kirk...of his wife of having murdered him, I assume that you would be talking about it," Shapiro said.
"Is that what Candace is accusing Erica of?"
Kelly seemed genuinely surprised and claimed she hadn't been listening to any of that. But Shapiro's point was that when someone goes off the rails like that confronting them ought to trump any personal friendship.
The topic then returned to Tucker Carlson with Kelly suggesting Shapiro had started the fight by naming him in one of his videos. I won't walk through all of that, you can watch it all below, but there was a clear disagreement, with Shapiro arguing he had attacked Carlson's ideas while Carlson had responded by attacking his motives. Kelly mostly seemed to be trying to play peacemaker and waving off some of Carlson's comments as merely rhetoric.
I don't know who started what here so I'm not prepared to put that much weight on the inside-drama element of this. What does seem clear is that Carlson and Shapiro are on opposite sides of the Gaza war and views of Israel at this point. Tucker's whole enterprise these days seems focused on finding new friends who share his views of Israel, up to and including an actual Hitler and Stalin fan named Nick Fuentes.
Carlson said yesterday in his interview with Kelly that he had tried to present a case to Fuentes for treating people as individuals and not giving into racist categorization, which he equated with leftist identity politics. I rewatched the interview with Fuentes yesterday and Carlson did do that. He pushed those points at Fuentes around the midpoint of their discussion. Fuentes mostly responded by agreeing (even saying he's enjoined to love everyone as a Catholic) and then adding a bunch of anti-Jewish caveats.
What Carlson didn't do was pin Fuentes down as someone who clearly rejects the idea that people are individuals. Fuentes is a skilled talker and Carlson just sort of lets him skate around it. All Carlson needed to do was say something like, "if you get what I'm saying, why did you call my friend Usha Vance a 'jeet' recently?" Put him on the spot at least once. But Carlson just never did. He said he preferred to just let Fuentes talk and Fuentes, not surprisingly, chose not to repeat those kind of slurs.
Yesterday Carlson mocked the idea of calling Fuentes a racist as if the only point in doing so would be to make himself feel good about what a moral person he is. I really think the far-left's cancel culture has made a mess of this. The fact that they deem everyone a racist all the time, has convinced people on the right that this language has no meaning at all. It's just a dishonest line of attack. And, yeah, as used by the left that's often true.
The problem is that there are still some actual racists around, like Nick Fuentes. In his case, the word racist legitimately applies, not as an all-purpose attack line or a rhetorical tactic, but as an accurate descriptor of what someone believes. Fuentes is a Hitler stan. He's a racist not a "racist." I think Carlson knows it but decided he couldn't say it without getting mocked as someone just trying to morally preen in Fuentes presence. That's a shame because it's okay to morally distinguish yourself from an actual Nazi. That's not a leftist trope in this case.
In any case, here's Shapiro's discussion with Megyn Kelly.
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