"It is time for us to expel Carlson, Fuentes, and their ilk from the conservative movement. We can do it, just as Buckley expelled Welch and the John Birch Society: by logic and reason. The proofs are entirely clear. Carlson et al. are not conservatives but they are a pernicious influence on those whose beliefs are truly conservative."
"The late William F. Buckley, Jr. must be credited as one of the people who established modern conservatism in the United States. He had a weather eye for what or who could help or hurt the movement.
"In the early 1960s, Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society, labeled former president Dwight Eisenhower, former secretary of state George C. Marshall, and many other leading Republicans as communists. He, and the Birch Society, claimed that every federal agency had been taken over by the communists. After many debates and much correspondence with Welch, Buckley led a movement to expel Welch and the John Birch Society from the conservative movement and he succeeded.
"Buckley did so with logic and reason and at great risk to himself and to his then-new publication, National Review. It was, he judged, a risk worth taking and he succeeded. He made the Birch Society anathema to conservatives.
"We cannot know how Buckley would have dealt with Tucker Carlson but it is a safe bet that he would have driven Carlson and the rest of his gaggle out of the conservative movement, as he did with Welch and the Birchers.
"It is now up to us to expel the loudest anti-Semites from the conservative movement. They aren’t conservatives: they are, quite simply, bad people who use the conservative brand to conceal their racism and anti-Semitism.
"We know who they are and so do they. They range from Tucker Carlson (who my friend Mark Levin calls “Qatarlson” for his sympathy and emulation of the rhetoric of the Qataris who back Hamas) to people such as Nick Fuentes, who was recently given a friendly interview by Carlson.
"In 2021, Carlson gave an impassioned defense of the white supremacist “great replacement” theory which holds that whites are being replaced by people of color. More recently Carlson has described Ukrainian President Zelensky, who is Jewish, as “sweaty and rat-like,” “shifty,” and “dead-eyed,” which are common anti-Semitic tropes." . . .
"This isn’t about “cancel culture.” It’s about ridding the conservative movement of the people who don’t believe what conservatives believe. After all, in the interview with Fuentes that Roberts felt compelled to defend, Carlson savaged evangelical Christians, whose support for Israel suggests they suffer from a “brain virus.” Carlson exclaimed, “I despise Christian Zionists more than anyone else on earth.” Given that around 29 percent of Trump’s voters are white evangelicals, does that sound like a winning formula for conservatives?" . . . More...
