Only on the American right would anyone feign dismay when Tucker Carlson welcomed the frothing neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes last week for a cozy and caressing interview. Long before Carlson began to establish his own white nationalist credentials, he was clearly a product of America's trust-fund country-club reactionary class, where racism and antisemitism run deep.

Until recently, however, this scion of privilege had swathed his hostility toward Jews beneath layers of cable gabble. His old Fox News broadcast first popularized a mildly sanitized version of “The Great Replacement Theory,” concocted by neo-Nazis to blame Jewish leaders for nonwhite immigration – a conspiratorial myth that has incited murderous attacks on Jewish houses of worship as well as Black churches. Carlson has promoted and sanitized antisemites like Fuentes pal Kanye West in recent years, telltale evidence of his own nasty bigotry.

So this moment of reckoning with his Third Reich sympathies is long overdue, ss the right-wing chattering class assuredly knows. What seemed truly startling at first glance however, was the defense of Carlson mounted by Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation.

Rather than issue a rebuke or even simply remain silent -- as conservatives often do when confronted with such an embarrassment – Roberts piped up on video to protest the “venomous coalition” that censured Carlson. Ever brimming with clichés, the Heritage boss scolded that “canceling Fuentes is not the answer” and delivered his judgment that “the American people expect us to be focusing on our political adversaries on the left, not attacking our friends on the right.”

Friends? Within hours of that disastrous declaration, Roberts started backpedaling with statements highlighting Heritage’s past statements of opposition to antisemitism and reshuffling staffers who had too quickly and publicly endorsed his own bonehead remarks. By then, prominent Heritage board members were angrily denouncing his video and distancing themselves from him.

Among the offended trustess was Princeton law professor Robert P. George, who wrote: “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.”

Laudable sentiments, to be sure, but was it George or Roberts who more fully reflected the history of Heritage and the Republican ultra-right that the powerful foundation has so long embodied? The true answer is less uplifting than Americans might wish. For those of us who have observed the decay of “conservatism” over this past half-century, these latest eruptions of hard-core racism, antisemitism and fascism are the poisonous fruit of old roots.

Those roots were laid in the years when Heritage first became a formidable force in Washington, just as Ronald Reagan was poised to win the presidency. The Heritage leadership welcomed and promoted Roger Pearson, -- a notorious neo-Nazi propagandist and “race science” theorist newly arrived from England -- onto the editorial board of its main publication, Policy Review. Even after the Washington Post exposed Pearson in 1978 for hosting an “anti-communist” conference that swarmed with European and South American fascists as well as American neo-Nazis, Heritage leaders maintained their ties with him (although Policy Journal quietly dropped him from its masthead).

Four years later, his firm connections with Washington's Republican establishment won Pearson a letter of endorsement from the president himself, which in turn became another scandal. Yet neither the White House nor the Heritage Foundation ever renounced Pearson, choosing instead to issue feeble denials of his racism.

Strains of the diseased ideology that Pearson represented can be traced throughout the history of the Republican far right, dating back to the passionate defense of Nazi war criminals by the late Senator Joe McCarthy and the former White House aide Patrick Buchanan, whose unwholesome careers prefigured the rise of Donald Trump. The scandalous presence of Nazi collaborators in the GOP's Eastern European "ethnic heritage" groups briefly embarrassed the first Bush administration. And long before all that, the original “America First,” whose name is so proudly worn by Trump’s MAGA outfit, erected a national front for Nazi spies and homegrown fascists. Those were the original white nationalists.

Today many Republicans are no doubt sincerely alarmed by the hideous and growing cancer in their party and amid what is still somehow known as “conservatism.” This deadly sickness did not suddenly appear from nowhere and it cannot be extirpated until its history is confronted with honesty.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024).