MAGA the Link between Climate Denial, Racism, and Stalin Love

Recent new fracture in the MAGA/Conservative Republican movement illustrated above, is (climate denier) Tucker Carlson sane washing Neo Nazi leading light and Trump Dinner guest Nick Fuentes.
Carlson served up cupcake questions, refusing to even pursue Fuentes profession of admiration for Joseph Stalin, and congenially infused Ne0-Nazi hatred into mainstream discourse in the same way he has platformed Putinist talking points, making him a hero on Russian state media.
When some eyebrows were raised on the choice, one of the first to Tucker’s defense Kevin Roberts, famously of the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025.
Less famously, Roberts was the former head of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a key nerve center of the fossil fuel industry’s global influence campaign.
I’ve pointed out many times the strong correlation between climate denial and racism, which seems strong enough for some ambitious PhD student to consider a thesis exploring the link between anti-science ideations and hate ideologies.

Wall Street Journal Editorial Board:

An old political poison is growing on the new right, led by podcasters and internet opportunists who are preoccupied with the Jews. It is spreading wider and faster than we thought, and it has even found an apologist in Kevin Roberts, president of the venerable Heritage Foundation.

On Thursday Mr. Roberts released a startling video to oppose the alleged “cancellation” of Tucker Carlson and even of Hitler fanboy Nick Fuentes, whom Mr. Carlson had hosted for a chummy podcast interview. 

“I want to be clear about one thing: Christians can critique the state of Israel without being antisemitic,” Mr. Roberts began, sounding like what William F. Buckley Jr. used to call “a pyromaniac in a field of straw men.” This is what Hamas supporters on the left say: What do you mean? We were only criticizing Israel. Not exactly.

On Monday’s Carlson show, Mr. Fuentes assailed “organized Jewry” as the obstacle to American unity and “these Zionist Jews” as the impediment to the right’s success, while calling himself a fan of Joseph Stalin. Even while toning it down for the largest audience he’ll ever have, Mr. Fuentes still came off as an internet mashup of the worst of the 20th century.

Mr. Carlson said Mr. Fuentes should make his remarks about Jewish subversion of America more “universal,” so they can’t be dismissed as easily. But mainly the two agreed. Mr. Carlson shared with the Hitler admirer that he, too, despises Israel and Christian Zionists such as Ambassador Mike Huckabee and Sen. Ted Cruz. “I dislike them more than anybody,” Mr. Carlson said. They found common ground.
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Enter Mr. Roberts of the Heritage Foundation to assure us that Mr. Carlson is a victim of a “venomous coalition” that is “sowing division” by criticizing him. Mr. Carlson will always be “a close friend of the Heritage Foundation.” 

How about Mr. Fuentes? “I disagree with—and even abhor—things that Nick Fuentes says, but canceling him is not the answer either,” Mr. Roberts said. “When we disagree with a person’s thoughts and opinions, we challenge those ideas in debate.”

Which is precisely what Mr. Carlson and Mr. Roberts didn’t do. Mr. Carlson’s warm, credulous interview was nothing like his aggressive June episode with Mr. Cruz. But it was similar to his treatment of 9/11 truthers and all manner of anti-Jewish conspiracy theorists, including the President of Iran, whom he let get away in July with the explanation that “Death to America” really means “death to crimes, death to killing and carnage”—in other words, peace.

“Most importantly,” Mr. Roberts stressed in his video, “the American people expect us to be focusing on our political adversaries on the left, not attacking our friends on the right.” No enemies to the left is how socialists once justified alliances with Communists. The liberal anticommunists who fought that alliance in the mid-20th century did America a service.
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Amid criticism on Friday, Mr. Roberts scrambled to list Mr. Fuentes’s odiousness, but his initial contribution was to join in the Jew-baiting. His video framed the issue not as antisemitism, but as Christian freedom of conscience in the face of a hostile attempt to impose loyalty to Israel on Americans.

“My loyalty as a Christian and as an American is to Christ first and to America always,” Mr. Roberts said. “Conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class.” This was his theme, over and over, as if critics were demanding he hand over his faith and patriotism to Israel.

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The Racism/Science denial theme extends down to hyper local level, as a recent kerfuffle in my neck of rural Michigan shows.
In Maple Valley Township, Michigan, a 5 year battle over proposed clean energy projects has resulted in several Township boards being taken over by MAGA style anti-clean energy groups, who have passed restrictive ordinances banning clean energy.
One of these officials recently was discovered to have her own rather close connection to a rising Neo Nazi internet star.

MLive:

Meghyn Booth says she didn’t know she was married to a neo-Nazi influencer, not exactly. 

Did she realize her husband, Chris, had become more extreme in his views in the last few months?

She did. 

Had she watched the videos he began posting online in May, the ones where he said America “was built by and for white people” and talked about Nazis in the 1930s breaking “the chains of Jewish tyranny in Germany”? 

Not before they became an issue, she said. 

“There were signs,” said Booth, a Republican who was elected treasurer of Maple Valley Township in Montcalm County last year. “I’m not going to say there weren’t, but had he declared himself a National Socialist to me? No. It’s not something that we discuss at the dinner table.” 

She learned the extent of her husband’s National Socialist proclivities when a reporter for the British newspaper The Guardian contacted her over the summer about a story that would identify him as the creator of a YouTube channel called Shameless Sperg, which featured videos with titles like “Why I Hate Jews” and “Black Crime Matters.” 

The rest of the community learned about them after the story published in August. 

The question that is still splitting the community is whether Booth has provided adequate assurances that she will do her job without prejudice and it’s time to move on or whether the township needs a more potent reckoning with what it means to have a neo-Nazi in their midst.