MAGA thought leader Ben Shapiro made headlines earlier this week when he unloaded on his former friend and political ally Tucker Carlson over the latter’s chummy interview with the unabashed antisemite and white nationalist Nick Fuentes. Shapiro correctly accused Carlson of “normalizing” the vile identity-based hatred emanating from Fuentes and his followers, and called Carlson an “intellectual coward, a dishonest interlocutor and a terrible friend.”
Let’s not kid ourselves, racism and other forms of intolerance are already fully normalized within the MAGA movement.
As the conservative firewall that once isolated Fuentes as a “fringe” kook crumbles, MAGA is at war with itself. On one side, overt bigots such as Fuentes and Carlson have become increasingly critical of Israel and more open about their antisemitism. On the other side, pro-Israel right-wingers such as Shapiro who seemed comfortable with intolerance when it was directed at Blacks, immigrants, trans people and other marginalized groups, are shocked (shocked!) that their former friends also hate Jews.
The conundrum lies with mainstream MAGA stars like Shapiro wanting to clean the bigotry out of their house on an a la carte basis — but fear and loathing of “the other” is as MAGA as a red baseball cap. The ideological civil war over the increasing popularity of Fuentes (especially among young men) in the MAGA movement is a Spider-Man pointing meme come to life. The hate is coming from inside the house.
Case in point: Hours before New York City voters elected Zohran Mamdani as their next mayor, MAGA podcast superstar Megyn Kelly delivered a rant against the New York state assemblyman that was both chillingly prejudiced and comically un-self-aware.
Sounding very much like Archie Bunker with a law degree, Kelly said Mamdani, a U.S. citizen born in Uganda, is “not American,” and that Muslims “should not be ascending to our mayors and our governors” because “the tenets of Islam are not consistent with Western civilization.”
The xenophobic diatribe came a week after Kelly declared, “I do have a problem with Islam. I do. I think it’s totally incompatible with Western values and I don’t think people who practice Islam should be the leaders of America. I just don’t. That’s how I feel and I’m entitled to that belief because Islam is more than a religion. It is a political ideology…All of Islam is political Islam. That’s the truth. And we can’t be afraid to say it.”
Attempting to anticipate the counterargument that America is a nation of immigrants, Kelly retorted, “Yeah. Like immigrants like my grandfather from Italy, and then my grandfather on the other side from Ireland, who desperately wanted to assimilate. But if they didn’t … you’d have some guy with an Irish brogue eating a lot of meat and potatoes and drinking a lot. That was the most significant downside to the Irish not potentially assimilating. It’s a very different story when you’re talking about immigrants from Uganda who are Muslim at a minimum and potentially radicalized Muslims.”
“Muslim at a minimum.”
Fear and loathing of “the other” is as MAGA as a red baseball cap.
It’s apparently lost on Kelly that religious tolerance is a founding tenet of the United States. And indicting millions of Muslims as inherently dangerous and untrustworthy isn’t fearless iconoclasm — it’s gutter bigotry. It’s un-American. And it’s very difficult to believe Ben Shapiro, an Orthodox Jew, would be OK with another MAGA influencer declaring all Jews to be unfit for public office or disloyal to America.
Like Kelly, I’m an American descended from Italian and Irish immigrants. Unlike Kelly, I’m not oblivious to the connection between her xenophobic fulminations about Muslims and the kind of discrimination directed at our immigrant ancestors.
Irish immigrants in the 19th century were regularly met with “No Irish Need Apply” declarations in job listings. A Harper’s Weekly political cartoon from 1871 depicts an Irish immigrant as an ape waving a rum bottle, sitting on a gunpowder keg. In the early 20th century, the next wave of immigrants to America included many southern Europeans — and Italians were often depicted in the mainstream press as racially inferior criminals.
A New York Times editorial in 1891 deplored the public lynchings of 11 Italian immigrants in New Orleans, while also saying the victims were “sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins … to us a pest without mitigations.”
As for Kelly’s assertion that Islam is a “political ideology,” both Italians and Irish — two groups with large Catholic populations — were accused of being politically loyal to the Pope in Rome. When John F. Kennedy ran for president in 1960, he felt it necessary to give a televised address declaring that “contrary to common newspaper usage, I am not the Catholic candidate for president.”
As Kelly demonstrates, xenophobia’s practitioners usually consider past immigrants the “good ones” who loved America and assimilated instantly, but are certain the next wave will be made up of fifth columnists hell-bent on bringing the country down from the inside.
And let’s not kid ourselves, racism and other forms of intolerance are already fully normalized within the MAGA movement.
Last week, Vice President JD Vance repeated the debunked racist slander he pushed during the 2024 election that Haitian immigrants were stealing and eating their neighbors’ pets. Last month, Vance quickly came to the defense of a group of young Republican leaders who were exposed as participants in a racist and antisemitic group chat.
MAGA bankroller Elon Musk has endorsed antisemitic conspiracy theories and backed the Nazi-sympathizing German political party Alternative for Germany (AfD). And, of course, President Donald Trump’s got a long track record as MAGA’s bigot-in-chief.
Indicting millions of Muslims as inherently dangerous and untrustworthy isn’t fearless iconoclasm — it’s gutter bigotry.
Speaking at the Republican Jewish Coalition Leadership Summit this week, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said, “I just want to make it really clear: I’m in the ‘Hitler sucks’ wing of the Republican Party.” He smiled, selling it as a joke — but many a truth is said in jest. If there’s a “Hitler sucks” wing of the GOP, then the opposite wing, by definition, does not think “Hitler sucks.”
Meanwhile, after the election, Kelly endorsed MAGA intellectual architect Steve Bannon’s commentary on Mamdani’s victory: “Forty to fifty years of visa scams and ten to fifteen million illegal alien invaders, that’s what you end up with. If you don’t think that’s a reality check, you’re not paying attention.”
Shapiro and his allies may want to exorcise Carlson, Fuentes and other antisemites in MAGA’s midst. But if rooting out identity-based hatred and conspiracy theories about the sinister “other” is the goal (and it should be), MAGA’s big tent will have to get a whole lot smaller.
