US Politics

Political operatives on the far right have long spoken about their ambition to shift the “Overton window”. The aim is to “mainstream” ideas long considered unthinkable, through gradual, step-by-step radicalisation and repetition – especially on hot-button issues such as immigration, sexuality, race and identity.

If challenged, commentators respond by appealing to “free speech”, accusing their critics of denying this basic liberal right.

The career of former Fox News celebrity Tucker Carlson represents a case study in the success of this political strategy in the United States. As his recent interview with Holocaust revisionist Darryl Cooper highlights, the Overton window seems to have shifted so far that it now includes the extreme right in ways that were unthinkable as recently as a decade ago.

The interview on Carlson’s YouTube channel raises unsettling questions about the visions of history and politics all of this “free speech” is opening us towards, and how democratic debate could possibly be benefited by this process.

Careering free speech

Carlson has a history of promoting baseless claims. In late 2021, he exercised his freedom of speech by producing a three-part documentary alleging that the riot of Trump followers at the US Capitol on January 6 2021 was a “false flag” FBI operation, the true aim of which was to vilify the MAGA movement.

He has pushed COVID vaccine conspiracy theories and promoted the “great replacement” conspiracy theory on more than 400 shows. Long restricted to the extreme right fringe in Europe, this “theory” suggests that progressive elites in Western nations promote non-European immigration for their own political advantage, with the sinister ambition to “replace” the “white race”.

Carlson was ousted from Fox News in 2023, shortly after the cable network’s $787.5 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems for spreading disinformation about the 2020 election. His own emails admitting Fox’s dishonesty were used as evidence in the case.

Then came 2024. In February, Carlson visited Russia, becoming the first Western journalist to interview President Vladimir Putin since the start of the Ukraine war. Carlson allowed Putin to air his rationalisations for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, without any real challenge.

Aleksandr Dugin.
Duma.gov.ru via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

Carlson then sat down for his YouTube channel with Russian neofascist Aleksandr Dugin. Dugin is a pro-Putin intellectual who was once fired from his academic position for urging his countrymen to “kill, kill, kill” their Ukrainian neighbours. He has expressed admiration for the Waffen SS – the most radical military arm of the Nazi SS – and decried the “Jewish elite”, which he proposes runs the US. In 1996, Dugin called for “an authentic, real, radically revolutionary and consistent fascism” in Russia, “borderless as our lands, and red as our blood”.

Shortly after his interview with Dugin, Carlson hosted Cooper, who proposed that British prime minister Winston Churchill, not Adolf Hitler, was the “chief villain” of World War II.

As for the Holocaust? Cooper challenged almost everything “mainstream” historians agree about Nazi atrocities. He claimed the Nazis’ hands were tied due to food shortages after Hitler invaded Soviet Russia. Since Churchill had refused to admit defeat after the fall of France in 1940, the Nazis were effectively blockaded. This left them with a choice between slowly starving the millions of “prisoners” their invasions bequeathed them and the more “humane” measure of “finishing them off quickly”.

These views, which have long circulated in neo-Nazi circles, are demonstrably false. They transparently serve to sanitise Hitler’s atrocities.

Bipartisan concerns

With his interview with Cooper, Carlson’s journey to the farthest reaches of the political right finally seems to have sparked bipartisan concern. Alongside condemnation from the White House, criticism came from some conservative lawmakers, including New York Republican Mike Lawler, who commented:

Platforming known Holocaust revisionists is deeply disturbing. During my time in the State Assembly, I worked with Democrats and Republicans to ensure all students in New York received proper education on the Holocaust, something Mr Cooper clearly never had.

Conservative political theorist Leo Strauss once opined that Weimar Germany collapsed because its liberal freedoms allowed Nazism, with its craven appeals to base hatreds, to proliferate. The shift of the Overton window in the US to include the far-right makes his warning newly unsettling.

Conservative theorist Leo Strauss in 1939.
Monozigote, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

We have slowly arrived at a place where a commentator of enormous influence, who is close to a presidential candidate, is platforming a fan of Heinrich Himmler’s SS and neo-Nazi talking points.

The problem here is arguably not only that Carlson is hosting extremists such as Dugin and Cooper, but that he presents them to his many followers as courageous truth-tellers, whose views have been “forbidden” by censorious elites. He extolled Cooper as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States”. Elon Musk posted on X in praise of Carlson’s interview, before quietly removing the post.

The same wide-eyed sympathy characterised Carlson’s exchanges with Putin and Dugin. Little wonder the latter celebrated his interview as a great tactical victory. Carlson had, in effect, given Dugin’s ideas an entrée into the US, from which Dugin himself remains banned.

To what end?

The pressing question all this raises is just what good can possibly come from opening the Overton window to ideas which generations of people since World War II have known to be toxic and incompatible with the political values of nations such as the US and Australia, which Carlson visited earlier this year.

In response to this question, formulaic outrage about the right to freely express any and all ideas, including the most hateful and patently false, really doesn’t cut it. In political scientist Robert O. Paxton’s definition, fascism is characterised by:

obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by
compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

There is nothing in such a militant perspective consistent with the basic principles of democratic countries: social pluralism, the rule of law, multiparty politics with the peaceful transition of power, and the protected liberties of citizens – including freedom of speech.

Freedom of speech and its enemies

John Stuart Mill argued for freedom of speech on the grounds that the contest of opinions is needed to discover and share the truth. This classic liberal defence of free expression faces inescapable challenges, however, when it comes to the opinions of avowed enemies of “liberalism” such as Dugin and Cooper.

They are people who deride concerns about individual rights and protections. They assert the demands of the mythologised “ethnic community”. They conceive of politics as a war or struggle for domination.

Proponents of far-right views have, at best, a conditional interest in seeking the truth. Mill’s conception of a pluralistic public sphere of competing voices is anathema to them, if they attain power. They have no interest in fostering an independent-minded population capable of holding leaders to informed account.

The far right accepts the need to lie, suppress information and “strategically” present its position to different audiences. Such dishonesty is an instrument in the existential struggle. Its shameless deployment is a sign of strength and fidelity to the higher “truth” of the cause.

German philosopher Rainer Forst has studied the issues of free speech and toleration.
www.stephan-roehl.de, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

All of this suggests deep “free speech” reasons for scepticism about the formulaic appeal to this liberal value being used to mainstream the ideas of Dugin and Cooper. Liberal democracies champion toleration. Yet as philosopher Rainer Forst has shown in a classic study, this toleration necessarily requires the clear-sightedness to identify, and the forthrightness to oppose, principled intolerance and the promotion of group hatred.

The time is surely past for the postwar complacency that far-right politics “could never happen again” in new forms. This is a time when a US vice-presidential candidate has happily shared a stage with Carlson after his Cooper interview.

The same candidate now owns his willingness to “create” stories about immigrants to spread fear and division before a national election whose results his party has again committed to challenging should they lose.

It is time to outspokenly defend democratic values and institutions against their foes, rather than let the disingenuous appeal to “free speech” be used to undermine them. More

It might seem surprising today in the era of Donald Trump, but Republicans in the United States once championed immigration and supported pathways to citizenship for undocumented Americans.

In January 1989, Ronald Reagan’s final speech as president was an impassioned ode to the immigrants who made America “a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas”.

Contrast this with Trump, who has normalised dehumanising rhetoric and policies against immigrants. In this year’s presidential campaign, for instance, he has referred to undocumented immigrants as “animals” who are “poisoning the blood of our country”.

Both Trump and his vice presidential running mate, JD Vance, also repeated a false story about Haitian “illegal aliens” eating pets in Springfield, Ohio.

Perhaps most troubling, Trump has pledged to launch “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country”, if he’s elected.

Immigration policies throughout history

Nativism, or anti-immigrant sentiment, has a long history in American politics.

In 1924, a highly restrictive immigration quota system based on racial and national origins was introduced. This law envisaged America as a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant nation.

However, there was no restriction on immigrants from the Western Hemisphere. The agricultural and railroad sectors relied heavily on workers from Mexico.

In 1965, the quota system was replaced by visa preference categories for family and employment-based migrants, along with refugee and asylum slots.

Then, as violence and economic instability spread across Central America in the 1970s, there was a surge in undocumented immigration to the US.

Scholar Leo Chavez argues that in the late 1980s and early 1990s, an alarmist “Latino threat narrative” became the dominant motif in media discussions of immigration.

This narrative was frequently driven by Republican politicians in states on the US-Mexico border, who derived electoral advantage from amplifying voter anxieties.

The growing popularity of this negative discourse coincided with a significant increase in income inequality – a byproduct of neo-liberal policies championed by Reagan and other Republicans.

Read more:
Before Trump, there was a long history of race-baiting, fear-mongering and building walls on the US-Mexico border

A dramatic shift in Republican rhetoric

In the early-to-mid 20th century, Democrats were often the party that supported restrictive immigration and border policies.

However, most Republicans at the national level – strongly supported by business – tended to endorse policies that encouraged the easy flow of workers across the border and increased levels of legal immigration.

Prominent conservative Republicans also rejected vilifying rhetoric towards undocumented Americans. They presented all immigrants as pursuing opportunities for their families, a framing that emphasised a shared vision of the American dream. In this telling, their labour contributed to the economy and America’s growth and prosperity.

George H. W. Bush And Ronald Reagan debate immigration in a Republican primary debate in 1980.

Reagan, the most influential conservative of the late 20th century, opposed erecting a border wall and supported amnesty over deportation.

Reagan also strongly supported bipartisan immigration reform. In 1986, Congress passed an immigration act that increased border security funding, but also ensured 2.7 million undocumented immigrants, primarily of Latino background, were able to gain legal status.

Twenty years later, President George W. Bush and Republican Senator John McCain lobbied for a bipartisan bill that would have tightened border enforcement while simultaneously “legalising” an estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants. It was narrowly defeated.

This vocal support for immigrants by leading Republicans was striking because for much of the period between the late 1980s and the early 2000s, a majority of Americans actually wanted immigration levels reduced.

Then, around 2009, a dramatic shift in political rhetoric took place. The Tea Party movement brought border security and “racial resentment” towards immigrants centre stage, challenging conservative Republicans from the populist right.

Supporters of a controversial new law in Arizona in 2010 that made it a crime under state law to be in the country illegally.
Ross D. Franklin/AP

As a result, more and more Republicans began to voice restrictionist and xenophobic rhetoric and support legislation aimed at cracking down on illegal immigration.

What’s surprising, though, is the number of undocumented immigrants in the US was actually declining at this time, from 12.2 million in 2007 to 10.7 million in 2016.

Donald Trump and the new nativism

In this worsening anti-immigrant climate, Trump descended a golden escalator in mid-2015 to launch his presidential campaign.

In his speech that day, immigration was front and centre. Trump vowed to “build a great wall” and accused Mexico of sending “rapists” and “criminals” to America.

His speeches during the presidential campaign were marked by frequent anti-Mexican assertions and calls for Islamophobic visa policies. This hostile stance on immigration was central to his victory in both the Republican primaries and the general election against Hillary Clinton.

Once in office, Trump then adopted a “zero tolerance” stance towards undocumented immigration. His administration pursued a heartrending family separation policy that split children and their undocumented parents at the border. This approach was celebrated on conservative media outlets such as Fox News.

During his presidency, he also reduced legal immigration by almost half, drastically cut America’s refugee intake, and introduced bans on people from Muslim-majority countries.

Policy expert David Bier concluded the goal of Republican lawmakers had shifted:

It really looks like the entire debate about illegality is not the main issue anymore for Republicans in both chambers of Congress. The main goal seems to be to reduce the number of foreigners in the United States to the greatest extent possible.

Indeed, Trump’s vision of the nation had overtly racial overtones.

In one 2018 meeting, he asked why America should accept immigrants from “shithole countries” like Haiti, El Salvador or the African continent. His preference was for Norwegian migrants.

Immigration as a major election theme

From 2021–2023, undocumented US-Mexico border crossings surged due to natural disasters, economic downturns and violence in many Latin American and Caribbean nations. Many of the recent arrivals are asylum seekers.

Though the numbers have fallen sharply in 2024, immigration and the border are still one of the top issues for voters across the political spectrum. The issue is particularly important in the key swing state of Arizona.

In 2024, Trump’s central immigration promise was encapsulated by the beaming delegates waving signs calling for “Mass Deportations Now” at the Republican National Convention.

The Trump-Vance ticket has blamed undocumented immigrants for almost every economic and social problem imaginable. The two candidates present them as a dangerous and subversive “other” that cannot be assimilated into mainstream American culture.

Yet Trump, as both president and candidate, has worked to prevent the passage of border security legislation. Turmoil on the border benefits him.

And his nativism now encompasses all forms of immigration – he has pledged to curb legal channels for people to enter the country, as well.

All of this rhetoric has had a dramatic impact on public opinion. Between 2016 and 2024, the number of people supporting the deportation of undocumented immigrants jumped from 32% to 47%.

In July 2024, 55% of Americans also said they wanted to see immigration levels decrease, a 14-point increase in one year.

Many Americans do not perceive immigration as a source of vitality and renewal as they had in the past. Instead, reflecting Trump’s language, they are viewing immigrants as an existential threat to the country’s future. More

It might seem surprising today in the era of Donald Trump, but Republicans in the United States once championed immigration and supported pathways to citizenship for undocumented Americans.

In January 1989, Ronald Reagan’s final speech as president was an impassioned ode to the immigrants who made America “a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas”.

Contrast this with Trump, who has normalised dehumanising rhetoric and policies against immigrants. In this year’s presidential campaign, for instance, he has referred to undocumented immigrants as “animals” who are “poisoning the blood of our country”.

Both Trump and his vice presidential running mate, JD Vance, also repeated a false story about Haitian “illegal aliens” eating pets in Springfield, Ohio.

Perhaps most troubling, Trump has pledged to launch “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country”, if he’s elected.

Immigration policies throughout history

Nativism, or anti-immigrant sentiment, has a long history in American politics.

In 1924, a highly restrictive immigration quota system based on racial and national origins was introduced. This law envisaged America as a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant nation.

However, there was no restriction on immigrants from the Western Hemisphere. The agricultural and railroad sectors relied heavily on workers from Mexico.

In 1965, the quota system was replaced by visa preference categories for family and employment-based migrants, along with refugee and asylum slots.

Then, as violence and economic instability spread across Central America in the 1970s, there was a surge in undocumented immigration to the US.

Scholar Leo Chavez argues that in the late 1980s and early 1990s, an alarmist “Latino threat narrative” became the dominant motif in media discussions of immigration.

This narrative was frequently driven by Republican politicians in states on the US-Mexico border, who derived electoral advantage from amplifying voter anxieties.

The growing popularity of this negative discourse coincided with a significant increase in income inequality – a byproduct of neo-liberal policies championed by Reagan and other Republicans.

Read more:
Before Trump, there was a long history of race-baiting, fear-mongering and building walls on the US-Mexico border

A dramatic shift in Republican rhetoric

In the early-to-mid 20th century, Democrats were often the party that supported restrictive immigration and border policies.

However, most Republicans at the national level – strongly supported by business – tended to endorse policies that encouraged the easy flow of workers across the border and increased levels of legal immigration.

Prominent conservative Republicans also rejected vilifying rhetoric towards undocumented Americans. They presented all immigrants as pursuing opportunities for their families, a framing that emphasised a shared vision of the American dream. In this telling, their labour contributed to the economy and America’s growth and prosperity.

George H. W. Bush And Ronald Reagan debate immigration in a Republican primary debate in 1980.

Reagan, the most influential conservative of the late 20th century, opposed erecting a border wall and supported amnesty over deportation.

Reagan also strongly supported bipartisan immigration reform. In 1986, Congress passed an immigration act that increased border security funding, but also ensured 2.7 million undocumented immigrants, primarily of Latino background, were able to gain legal status.

Twenty years later, President George W. Bush and Republican Senator John McCain lobbied for a bipartisan bill that would have tightened border enforcement while simultaneously “legalising” an estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants. It was narrowly defeated.

This vocal support for immigrants by leading Republicans was striking because for much of the period between the late 1980s and the early 2000s, a majority of Americans actually wanted immigration levels reduced.

Then, around 2009, a dramatic shift in political rhetoric took place. The Tea Party movement brought border security and “racial resentment” towards immigrants centre stage, challenging conservative Republicans from the populist right.

Supporters of a controversial new law in Arizona in 2010 that made it a crime under state law to be in the country illegally.
Ross D. Franklin/AP

As a result, more and more Republicans began to voice restrictionist and xenophobic rhetoric and support legislation aimed at cracking down on illegal immigration.

What’s surprising, though, is the number of undocumented immigrants in the US was actually declining at this time, from 12.2 million in 2007 to 10.7 million in 2016.

Donald Trump and the new nativism

In this worsening anti-immigrant climate, Trump descended a golden escalator in mid-2015 to launch his presidential campaign.

In his speech that day, immigration was front and centre. Trump vowed to “build a great wall” and accused Mexico of sending “rapists” and “criminals” to America.

His speeches during the presidential campaign were marked by frequent anti-Mexican assertions and calls for Islamophobic visa policies. This hostile stance on immigration was central to his victory in both the Republican primaries and the general election against Hillary Clinton.

Once in office, Trump then adopted a “zero tolerance” stance towards undocumented immigration. His administration pursued a heartrending family separation policy that split children and their undocumented parents at the border. This approach was celebrated on conservative media outlets such as Fox News.

During his presidency, he also reduced legal immigration by almost half, drastically cut America’s refugee intake, and introduced bans on people from Muslim-majority countries.

Policy expert David Bier concluded the goal of Republican lawmakers had shifted:

It really looks like the entire debate about illegality is not the main issue anymore for Republicans in both chambers of Congress. The main goal seems to be to reduce the number of foreigners in the United States to the greatest extent possible.

Indeed, Trump’s vision of the nation had overtly racial overtones.

In one 2018 meeting, he asked why America should accept immigrants from “shithole countries” like Haiti, El Salvador or the African continent. His preference was for Norwegian migrants.

Immigration as a major election theme

From 2021–2023, undocumented US-Mexico border crossings surged due to natural disasters, economic downturns and violence in many Latin American and Caribbean nations. Many of the recent arrivals are asylum seekers.

Though the numbers have fallen sharply in 2024, immigration and the border are still one of the top issues for voters across the political spectrum. The issue is particularly important in the key swing state of Arizona.

In 2024, Trump’s central immigration promise was encapsulated by the beaming delegates waving signs calling for “Mass Deportations Now” at the Republican National Convention.

The Trump-Vance ticket has blamed undocumented immigrants for almost every economic and social problem imaginable. The two candidates present them as a dangerous and subversive “other” that cannot be assimilated into mainstream American culture.

Yet Trump, as both president and candidate, has worked to prevent the passage of border security legislation. Turmoil on the border benefits him.

And his nativism now encompasses all forms of immigration – he has pledged to curb legal channels for people to enter the country, as well.

All of this rhetoric has had a dramatic impact on public opinion. Between 2016 and 2024, the number of people supporting the deportation of undocumented immigrants jumped from 32% to 47%.

In July 2024, 55% of Americans also said they wanted to see immigration levels decrease, a 14-point increase in one year.

Many Americans do not perceive immigration as a source of vitality and renewal as they had in the past. Instead, reflecting Trump’s language, they are viewing immigrants as an existential threat to the country’s future. More