Former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger accused the party of a growing tolerance of Nazis, blasting Tucker Carlson’s interview with Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and the Heritage Foundation’s defense of it.
Kinzinger, a former member of the House Jan. 6 committee, made the savage remarks during an appearance on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360. His comments followed Carlson’s two-plus-hour interview with Fuentes, a self-proclaimed white nationalist and vocal antisemite.
He slammed Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts for standing by the former Fox News pundit amid the uproar that followed the interview.
Roberts, whose organization spearheads Project 2025, called Carlson “a close friend of the Heritage Foundation” and denounced the “venomous coalition” criticizing him.
“Congressman…I don’t understand why it’s a difficult question at all,” Cooper began. “Shouldn’t—I think all Republicans would condemn Nick Fuentes’ hateful comments, full stop.”
“Yeah, you’d think,” Kinzinger replied. “But remember, Donald Trump invited him... to Mar-a-Lago to have lunch with him and Kanye.”
He continued, “This is crazy. I mean, look, this is—there’s always been, you know, we’d have Lincoln Day dinners, right? This is like the big fundraisers for the GOP. And there’d always be a weird table. And the weird table would always have one or two people that were kind of like Nazi-ish, I guess. And that firewall, for the most part, in the GOP, held where it’s like, yeah, they may be considered to the right, but they’re not part of us.”
He said, “It feels like that firewall is crumbling.”
“You hear sometimes people on the right say, we have no enemies to the right. And what they’re saying is anybody that is on the right, even as far as Nazism—we have no enemies, we have to make common cause. The ultimate enemy is the left and the liberals.
“And so the fact that it has taken Kevin, that Heritage Foundation president or chairman, whatever, as long as it has to condemn that is enough to say like that firewall is crumbling now.”
Kinzinger added, “I’ll give Ted Cruz something here for speaking out as quickly as they did on this... But this—this has to be burned right out of the party. And unfortunately, it’s taking too long to do that.”
Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, who has previously clashed with Carlson, criticized the Fuentes interview.
“If you sit there with someone who says Adolf Hitler was very, very cool and that their mission is to combat and defeat ‘global Jewry,’ and you say nothing, then you are a coward, and you are complicit in that evil,” Cruz said.
Roberts’ defense of Carlson sparked turmoil within the Heritage Foundation. CNN reported that several members of its antisemitism task force resigned in protest.
“It’s an absolute s--tshow. He’s lost control of the organization,” a senior staff member told CNN. “It is open rebellion, it is disgust… 85 percent are totally disgusted.”
Kinzinger, 47, was an Illinois representative from 2011 to 2023, and a vocal skeptic of Trump’s claims of election fraud. He did not seek re-election in 2022.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
