Donald Trump Jr. blamed the uproar over Tucker Carlson’s friendly chat with Nick Fuentes and radicalism on the right more generally on “neocon handles” during a recent conversation with Jillian Michaels.
In an episode of Michaels’s YouTube show that dropped on Sunday, the host mused that “You’re starting to see some of the things in the alt-right fringe — the Nick Fuentes and the young Republican group chat — that is racist, and that is scary, and sexist to an alarming degree with someone like Nick Fuentes. And I’m wondering, you’re seeing this kind of fracture the left, I’m seeing people who are more moderate become alarmed. And people on the right are like, ‘Yeah, yeah, whatever, not a big deal.””
“I’m here to tell you it’s a big deal. And I think it’s a big deal because all of those people that your dad invited in — Tulsi, Kennedy, myself, inadvertently, right? All of these more-, Rogan, all of these more moderate people who fled the crazy on the left are alarmed if the right doesn’t disavow the Nick Fuenteses,” she continued. “And it doesn’t mean-, I’m not saying cancel Tucker Carlson. That is not what I’m saying. I wish Tucker had handled him differently, I have no problem saying that. But I do think it’s going to be a problem. And I’m wondering if you see it as a problem for the right in the midterms and in 2028. Because I think if this continues without it being fully condemned aggressively, I think you get Gavin Newsom for president. And I know what that looks like, and it’s scary stuff.”
“I’m a little torn on the issue. I think sometimes, you know, having been canceled and having, you know, for even common sense things, you know, I’m not about cancel culture, but I think sometimes, you know, I don’t know that you have to platform everyone, but you know, let them sort of speak. And I think some of those radicals, they sort of give themselves up in many cases in their own things. And I’m I’m good friends with Tucker, and I actually don’t think he’s really all that radical at all. I think, I do see a lot of stuff that’s sort of manufactured crises. I see a lot of sort of the neocon handles trying to create these conflicts to break it up because they want to go back to the old ways, not the America First ways,” replied Trump, who continued:
I do think that sort of social media and the way those things have been been manipulated and some of these, you know, the stuff you’re seeing even this week with, you know, well, “Oh, this account that’s you know, America First is, you know, driven out of you know, some country in the middle of nowhere.” It’s like they’re they’re actually trying to sow discord and create you know a fight that probably really doesn’t exist with the vast majority of people.
I think, you know, again, I’m sort of a free speech absolutist, but that doesn’t mean there’s not consequences to that speech. And if you hear some people speak and you don’t like, you know, like, man, I sort of feel like they they almost cancel themselves, and not with censorship, but by people being like, okay, that’s not even a reasonable position, We’re just not gonna listen to this person anymore. And so I do think that’s important because again, I’ve seen what they try to do to so many people. I was one of the early guys calling out a lot of the censorship on Twitter and they’re like, “Well, how do you know?” I was like, well, I know because yesterday I was getting five thousand retweets a post, today I’m getting three. Not three thousand, three.
Like single digits, three. Like that’s- something happened, something changed. And so, you know, I think we have to have conversations, even conversations we don’t want to hear, or even conversations we think may be disgusting and listen, and then people will make up their own minds and they’ll sort of, you know, the way I look at it, you kind of vote with your wallet. You walk away from that and you figure it out on your own.
“I’m just deeply concerned that if there’s a guy who says women want to be raped, and somebody does not say, ‘This is not who we are as a party, this is not conservativism, we find him repulsive,’ it’s-, I’m telling you…” warned Michaels.
“Yeah. But I also think sometimes even acknowledging– what you do, if you’re gonna acknowledge every person that says something ridiculous, all of a sudden you’re just making them bigger in a way. Sometimes you just gotta let the idiocy just go out there in the ether, and you can’t respond to everything, right?” countered Trump. “Because it just becomes like clickbait troll-worthy stuff. And everyone starts doing it, and everyone then starts taking their own bait. And, you know, and that’s sort of what I was alluding to earlier with like some of the stuff go, you know, going on right now. It’s like everyone’s just trying to like out radicalize themselves for clicks and this, and it’s, you know, it it’s a bit nuts.”
“And I don’t think we do that as well as the left. The left sort of has their talking points and they generally speaking stick to them, even if I disagree with them vehemently. You know, we’re a little different in that we are a lot more open. We do have a lot more different, you know, viewpoints. We don’t just say, ‘Okay, well, the party says this, so we’re gonna go with this.” You know, we still have that discourse, and we have those disagreements, and we move on. And I do think a lot of that fracture that you know you’re talking about is also ,I think a lot of it’s just being created to actually try to break up that movement,” added the president’s son. “I don’t know that it’s as real as it is, but it doesn’t matter if millions of people are talking about it online because they think it’s real or they think it’s coming from a good place, and they think that you know this is an organic thing that’s not a pay-to-play campaign, you know, that is a little scary, and I think people have to wake up to some of that.”
Watch above via Jillian Michaels on YouTube.
