Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, Kevin Roberts, Robert P. George

• The Wrong "One Voice", by Jonah Goldberg. The Dispatch 10/31/25 -- gets to the heart of Robert's problematic defense of Tucker Carlson:

  But something funny happened to Carlson after he struck out on his own in “independent media.” To whatever extent he asked fearless, tough questions and told necessary but unpopular truths before (a very debatable proposition), he pretty much gave up even the pretense of any of that once he struck out on his own with his personal media platform. He didn’t ask particularly tough questions of the Qatari prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani. He didn’t speak truth to power when speaking to Vladimir Putin, he lobbed softballs at him—when he wasn’t walking around Moscow like a pitchman for the Kremlin Grocers Association. He did show a little grit interviewing Sen. Ted Cruz about his support of Israel and strikes on Iran but was fairly servile when talking to the actual president of Iran.

  More recently, Carlson has invited a slew of Jew haters, anti-American cranks, and crackpots on his show, and Roberts has stood with him. When Carlson invited Darryl Cooper, a loopy Holocaust and World War II revisionist on his show in September 2024, he didn’t ask him any meaningfully tough questions, unless variants of “tell me more” are tough questions. Roberts did tweet a defense of Winston Churchill after Cooper and Tucker had floated the batty claim that Churchill was the real villain of World War II. But Roberts was careful not to mention Carlson. Roberts didn’t noticeably dissent from Cooper’s claims that Jews just ended up dead because the Germans failed to plan for all of their POWs. And then, just to make it clear he didn’t hold the Cooper interview against him, Roberts appeared at a Tucker Carlson Live event days later. He then recruited Carlson to write a "Dear Fellow Patriot" fundraising letter for Heritage 10 days after Carlson called Cooper "the most important historian in the United States."

  All of this past context is prologue for the events of the last week. Carlson hosted Nick Fuentes, a Hitler- and Stalin-loving rabid antisemite and racist, on his show. Carlson asked no meaningfully tough questions of the Jew-hating gargoyle. They just had a nice chat about how much they hate Zionism, Zionists, especially Christian ones (like George W. Bush, Mike Huckabee, and Ted Cruz who suffer from what Carlson calls the “brain virus” of Zionism), and agreed in word and deed to form a kind of de facto mutual admiration society.

• Kevin Roberts' initial video on Twitter in unabashed defense of Tucker Carlson 10/30/25.
• Kevin Roberts' subsequent meeting w/ Heritage Foundation staff upset over his speech defending Tucker's interview with Fuentes 11/5/25.
  • ‘I Made A Mistake’: Heritage Foundation President Apologizes to Staff 11/05/25.
• Heritage Foundation Board Member Resigns Over Video Defending Carlson. New York Times 11/17/25. Robert P. George, said the think tank’s president had refused to retract his video defending Tucker Carlson’s friendly interview with an openly antisemitic white supremacist.
• Statement of Robert P. George Twitter, 11/1/25:

  A few days ago, I posted a brief statement of what I, as a conservative, seek to conserve. The first item on the list was what I regard as the foundational principle of all sound morality: the profound, inherent, and equal dignity of each and every member of the human family. Everything else I believe about ethics and politics in one way or another stands upon or presupposes that principle. Any form of “conservatism” (or “liberalism”) that denies it in principle or transgresses it in practice is alien to me.

  That is why I believe that the conservative movement, though it can and should be a broad tent, simply cannot include or accommodate white supremacists or racists of any type, antisemites, eugenicists, or others whose ideologies are incompatible with belief in the inherent and equal dignity of all. As a conservative, I say that there is no place for such people in our movement.

  So, while I understand and appreciate that politics is about “adding and multiplying, not subtracting and dividing,” and though I welcome conservatives representing a range of viewpoints on a wide swath of issues, I will not—I cannot—accept the idea that we have “no enemies to the right.” The white supremacists, the antisemites, the eugenicists, the bigots, must not be welcomed into our movement or treated as normal or acceptable.

• The Right’s Thirty-Year War, by Daniel McCarthy. First Things 11/18/25 - situates the latest rupture between Robert P. George and the Heritage Foundation in a long history of conflict between (neo)conservatives and paleoconservatives, back to William F. Buckley's anguished parting with Pat Buchanan and Richard Sobran, and Fr. Neuhaus' leaving Chronicles and the Rockford Institute to found Firt Things.
• Prof. George Is Right: Principle Sustains American Conservatism, by Peter Berkowitz. Real Clear Politics 11/16/25.

Michael Novak: "Writing from Left to Right: My Journey from Liberal to Conservative"

Writing from Left to Right: My Journey from Liberal to Conservative
Image Books. September 2013.

Engagingly, writing as if to old friends and foes, Michael Novak shows how Providence (not deliberate choice) placed him in the middle of many crucial events of his time: a month in wartime Vietnam, the student riots of the 1960s, the Reagan revolution, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Bill Clinton's welfare reform, and the struggles for human rights in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also spent fascinating days, sometimes longer, with inspiring leaders like Sargent Shriver, Bobby Kennedy, George McGovern, Jack Kemp, Václav Havel, President Reagan, Lady Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II, who helped shape—and reshape—his political views.

Yet through it all, as Novak’s sharply etched memoir shows, his focus on helping the poor and defending universal human rights remained constant; he gradually came to see building small businesses and envy-free democracies as the only realistic way to build free societies. Without economic growth from the bottom up, democracies are not stable. Without protections for liberties of conscience and economic creativity, democracies will fail. Free societies need three liberties in one: economic liberty, political liberty, and liberty of spirit.

Novak’s writing throughout is warm, fast paced, and often very beautiful. His narrative power is memorable.

Presentations

• Crisis Co-Founder Celebrates 80th Year with New Memoir, by Michael Pakaluk. Crisis Magazine. 09/09/13.
• Excerpt
• "Writing from Left to Right: My Journey From Liberal to Conservative" CSPAN-2 BookTV. Address to the Kirkpatrick Society at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.
• Between the Covers: Interview with Michael Novak. National Review 10/01/13.
• Kresta in the Afternoon: Michael Novak 10/8/13.
• Five Questions with Michael Novak, by Joshua Mercer. CatholicVote.com.

Reviews

• Michael Novak, from Socialism to Conservatism, by Christopher White.
• Capturing a Political and Spiritual Moment, by Fr. John McCloskey. National Catholic Register 09/14/13.
• A Catholic for All Seasons, by Mary Eberstadt. National Review 10/14/13.
• BOOK REVIEW: ‘Writing From Left to Right’ Washington Times 12/4/13.

Also of Interest

PAPAL ECONOMICS: The Catholic Church on Democratic Capitalism, from Rerum Novarum to Caritas in Veritate, by Maciej Zieba.
Intercollegiate Studies Institute. July 31, 2013.

Maciej Zieba, OP, a close associate of Pope John Paul II, is the author of The Surprising Pope: Understanding the Thought of John Paul II. He was a key player in the Polish Solidarity movement and is the director of the European Solidarity Center and the founder of the Tertio Millennio Institute in Poland. Father Zieba has lectured extensively on economics and theology. Reviews

• Popes on Economics, by Michael P. Orsi. First Things 10/23/13. "There exists a great deal of confusion regarding the popes’ social encyclicals. The problem is threefold: they span over one hundred years in changing political and social milieus; the language that is used is inconsistent; and, finally, there are competing tensions contained in the documents. This book navigates the reader through the confusion."
• Toward a More Human State of Economics, by Gabriel Torretta, O.P. Catholic World Report 10/16/13.

Irving Kristol, 1920-2009

And so we lose another giant. A self-identified liberal "mugged by reality", Irving Kristol, commonly heralded as the godfather of 'neo'-conservatism, has died. Hillel Italie gives an account of his life for RealClearPolitics.com:

A Trotskyist in the 1930s, Kristol would soon sour on socialism, break from liberalism after the rise of the New Left in the 1960s and in the 1970s commit the unthinkable — support the Republican Party, once as "foreign to me as attending a Catholic Mass."

He was a New York intellectual who left home, first politically, then physically, moving to Washington in 1988. ... his turn to the right joined by countless others, including such future GOP Cabinet officials as Jeane Kirkpatrick and William Bennett and another neoconservative founder, Norman Podhoretz.

"The influence of Irving Kristol's ideas has been one of the most important factors in reshaping the American climate of opinion over the past 40 years," Podhoretz said.

Among the host of publications he is credited as founding and/or editing was Commentary magazine (from 1947 to 1952); The Public Interest (from 1965 to 2002) and The National Interest from 1985 to 2002.

Kristol's life, along with that of his fellow "New York intellectuals" Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, and Nathan Glazer, was the subject of the 1998 documentary, "Arguing the World". In July 2002 he was awarded the Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush, the highest civilian honor in the United States.