MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
It's Thursday, and that means another drop of NPR's national security podcast. On this week's Sources & Methods, how extreme views on the far right are dividing Americans. Now, that is clearly a political story, but what does it have to do with national security? I put that to NPR domestic extremism correspondent Odette Yousef.
ODETTE YOUSEF, BYLINE: You know, 9/11 was a physical assault on U.S. soil by a foreign enemy, and I think that that is sort of traditionally how we've thought about the question of national security. And so now, fast-forward to January 6, when we look at what happened that day, sort of the attempt to forcefully prevent the results of a Democratic election from going forward, that was a threat from within. So national security does include sort of this concern about domestic extremism. The way that I think about it is that these strands of an authoritarian movement that we're seeing on the right really are about taking apart the very principles of inclusive democracy that distinguished America from its enemies on 9/11.
KELLY: Now, Odette and I were talking about this because of a controversy that's splitting the Republican Party. Specifically, conservative talk show host Tucker Carlson's interview with Nick Fuentes. Fuentes has praised Hitler, defended Jim Crow and called for a holy war against Jews. A think tank closely aligned with the Trump administration initially defended the interview.
KELLY: This was not a hard-hitting interview. This was a friendly chat.
YOUSEF: It was. I mean, you can find many of Nick Fuentes' statements online. I mean, he's online all the time. You know, at one point in the interview he talks about his love for Stalin.
KELLY: Stalin who - just for the record, the Soviet leader who killed millions of his own people. Go on.
YOUSEF: That's right. So yeah, it was an odd sort of treatment of the opportunity to really query Nick Fuentes, I would say.
KELLY: Although, why did this interview in particular trigger such a big fight within the GOP that we're sitting here talking about it as a national security story? Because Tucker Carlson has had - I'm trying to remember - a Holocaust conspiracist on his show before. He has promoted the racist theory, the Great Replacement conspiracy theory.
YOUSEF: So the furor seems really to be centering on the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C., that played a large role in creating Project 2025. Carlson is a close friend to the Heritage Foundation. And there were calls for the Heritage Foundation basically to chastise Tucker Carlson for having platformed Nick Fuentes.
KELLY: And they did the opposite, at least initially.
YOUSEF: Yes. The head of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, declined to do that. He posted a video on X where he said they wouldn't capitulate to pressure from the, quote, "globalist class" to cancel people on the right. Globalists, this is a well-known dog whistle among antisemitic conspiracists. So his refusal to sort of distance the Heritage Foundation from this created this uproar on the right. And so several people working at the Heritage Foundation, particularly on their effort to fight antisemitism, left the organization. But there was also, like, a wider controversy just within the Republican Party, where current and former senators basically were like, it's time to draw the line and disavow the, quote, "Hitler is cool" wing within the party.
KELLY: Yeah. I'll just name-drop a few of them. Senator Ted Cruz. Senator Mitch McConnell. We also heard from conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro. There are plenty of conservatives out there...
YOUSEF: Senator Lindsey Graham.
KELLY: Right - condemning the Fuentes appearance. But I - you know, there's a bigger context. This interview did not happen in isolation. And I'm thinking of some other racist rhetoric coming from parts of the political right just a couple of weeks ago. Politico published this - excerpts from a group chat. This was leaders of Young Republican groups.
YOUSEF: Yeah, that's right. So private chats that were happening among leaders of Young Republicans in four states, where they were saying things like, I love Hitler and...
KELLY: Joking about sending political opponents to the gas chamber and so on. I do need to note, NPR has not independently verified those texts. We're citing Politico reporting here. Which did not stop Vice President JD Vance from leaping into the fray. This is him talking about pearl-clutching in an episode of "The Charlie Kirk Show."
(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "THE CHARLIE KIRK SHOW")
JD VANCE: And I really don't want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke - telling a very offensive, stupid joke - is cause to ruin their lives.
KELLY: I don't want to grow up in that kind of country either, but I will note that the people in this alleged chat were all adults, right, Odette?
YOUSEF: Yeah. I mean, Young Republicans goes up to the age of 40, and some of them held elected positions. These weren't people that were still in college, necessarily.
KELLY: NPR's Odette Yousef on our national security podcast Sources & Methods. You can hear it wherever you get your podcasts.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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