When Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts responded to the latest controversy roiling the Republican Party — podcaster Tucker Carlson’s friendly interview with white nationalist Nick Fuentes — it was a touch ironic that Roberts’ chosen venue to defend Carlson was on the social media platform X, where Roberts posted a video on Thursday calling Carlson a “close friend.”

That’s because X is the only mainstream social media site where Fuentes is still allowed to have an account, after being banned on Meta’s platforms and on YouTube for a long history of hateful rhetoric targeting Jews, women, Black people and many other minority groups. The far-right conspiracy theorist was once banned from X, too, but owner Elon Musk allowed Fuentes back onto the platform last year. 

“He will be reinstated, provided he does not violate the law, and let him be crushed by the comments and Community Notes,” Musk posted on X in May 2024. “It is better to have anti whatever out in the open to be rebutted than grow simmering in the darkness.”

Now, Fuentes has more than a million followers on the platform and a wider reach than ever before. His interview with Carlson, where he said a “big challenge” to unifying the country is “organized Jewry,” has more than 17 million views on X and 5 million views on YouTube. 

Their interview — and the fact that Heritage, one of the most venerable conservative institutions in the country, is defending Carlson — has sparked a reckoning in the Republican Party about a growing strain of antisemitism on the right. It has also reignited a debate about “cancel culture” and social media, and whether platforms like X have a responsibility to police the content that appears there.

Many conservatives, even those who have sharply condemned Carlson for hosting Fuentes, believe banning people because of their beliefs, no matter how hateful, is wrong. 

“I believe that Nick Fuentes is odious and despicable, but I’ve never called for his cancellation, and in fact, I’ve called for his restoration to those services, despite the fact that I think he’s odious and despicable,” Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro said on Monday in a podcast. “The issue here isn’t that Tucker Carlson had Nick Fuentes on his show last week. He has every right to do that, of course. The issue here is that Tucker Carlson decided to normalize and fluff Nick Fuentes, and that the Heritage Foundation then decided to robustly defend that performance.”

(Roberts pledged to stand against antisemitism and offered an apology to his “Jewish friends” in a Monday night speech.)

Tal Fortgang, a legal policy fellow at the Manhattan Institute think tank, argued that banning Fuentes in the first place gave him the oxygen he craved — which increased exponentially when Musk then publicly allowed him to return to the platform after reversing the content moderation policies of X’s prior management, when he purchased the company in 2022.

“These underground counter-cultural movements thrive on being policed. They see that internally as a sign that they’re winning,” Fortgang told Jewish Insider. “What does empower people like Fuentes is saying, ‘Only certain people are going to be allowed to post on X. We’re going to have ill-defined content moderation policies, and we thought he was forbidden, but turns out, he’s permitted.’ That sends a message that he is within the window of acceptable discourse.” 

Fuentes is still banned on other social media sites, even as other popular platforms like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube have rolled back some of their own content moderation policies this year. 

“They’re doing less than they used to do, but they’re still doing more than X,” Yfat Barak-Cheney, director of international affairs and director of technology and human rights at the World Jewish Congress, said of the other major social media platforms. X is “absolutely” the mainstream social media site where antisemitism is most visible and most tolerated, she said. A September report from the Jewish Council for Public Affairs found that antisemitism is “thriving in plain sight” on X. 

“Research has definitely shown that since the takeover [by Musk], between a change in the consequences or the sanctions on hateful speech, the reduction of the size of the teams working on this and the general atmosphere on the platform, we’ve definitely seen a lot more right-wing extremism and antisemitism, and also from the left,” Barak-Cheny told JI. “It’s just a platform that’s easier to work on without being sanctioned.” 

X’s policies still prohibit abuse and hateful content, particularly when targeting users directly. But enforcement of those policies is at best inconsistent and at worst near-nonexistent. (A spokesperson for X did not respond to a request for comment.)

“We are concerned about the spread of antisemitism and extremism, on social media platforms, including X, where antisemites and extremists are operating largely unchecked,” a spokesperson for the Anti-Defamation League said. “We continue to urge these platforms to invest in their trust and safety teams and engage in meaningful content moderation to ensure Jewish and all users are safe.”

Some Fuentes critics tried to walk a fine line between expressing concern about his reinstatement and reiterating their opposition to censorship.

“Musk went too far in opening up his venue,” said David Bernstein, founder of the North American Values Institute, which fights left-wing antisemitism. “Those who have tried to regulate speech have gone too far in the opposite direction.”

Karen Paikin Barall, chief policy officer at the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, a nonprofit legal center, suggested that allowing Fuentes back on X may have been a mistake, though she did not call for his removal.

“Free speech must never be hindered. It’s one of the core principles on which our nation was founded. But platforms like Discord, Steam, Twitch, Reddit, Meta, X and TikTok need to enforce their own rules consistently, without double standards when it comes to Jews,” Barall told JI, before adding: “Allowing someone like Nick Fuentes back on a major platform raises real concerns about consistency and accountability.”

If Fuentes were once again removed from X, it might give those who oppose his hate-filled ideology some relief. But one Jewish official at a different technology company, who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to press, cautioned that it is Fuentes’ interlocutor Carlson — who has given a platform to prominent right-wing antisemites over the past year — who offers a warning for what happens when institutional guardrails are removed.

“Everyone who thought Tucker was a problem when he was at Fox and saw him trending in this direction saw some comfort in the fact that he was going to be off Fox News. And what did that do? It liberated him,” said the tech company staffer. “It didn’t, like, de-platform him. There’s no such thing as de-platforming anymore. You can’t do it, not really. They’ll find a way.”

American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Danielle Pletka wrote in a blog post on Monday that “silence is complicity” as she called for fellow conservatives to call out Roberts’ actions at Heritage, and to condemn Carlson and Fuentes. But she told JI that the answer is not kicking Fuentes off X again.

“Censorship is not the right tool. It really isn’t. And censorship doesn’t make bad people go away. To the contrary, it makes them go underground,” Pletka said. “I’d rather know who these people are.”