WTH: How Do We Keep Neo-Nazis Out of the Conservative Movement? Eli Lake Explains.
What the Hell Is Going On
AEI Podcasts
4.4 • 633 Ratings
🗓️ 7 November 2025
⏱️ 72 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The fever swamps of the alt-right have crept upstream. Fringe figures are making their way onto increasingly mainstream platforms, spreading ideological contagion to impressionable young audiences. Having long covered the creeping antisemitism of the Left, the fight now unfolding on the Right is an inspiring and essential one. With his debut WTH appearance, Eli Lake reminds us that this isn’t a question of free speech, it’s a question of policing one’s own coalition with moral clarity. If the Right doesn’t get this right, what will 2028 look like for the Republican Party?
Eli Lake is a veteran journalist with expertise in foreign affairs and national security who has reported for Bloomberg, The Daily Beast, and Newsweek. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI. Eli is currently the host of Breaking History, a new history podcast from The Free Press, where he regularly publishes.
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast is brought to you by the American Enterprise Institute. |
| 0:03.1 | If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, review, and share. |
| 0:07.1 | Thanks for listening. Here's our show. |
| 0:08.7 | What the hell is going on? |
| 0:10.5 | What's really going on? |
| 0:12.0 | We said, what the hell happened? |
| 0:13.5 | You don't have to know what the hell is on it. |
| 0:15.6 | They see what's going on. |
| 0:16.7 | I don't know what's going on. |
| 0:18.0 | What is going on? |
| 0:20.0 | We must find out what's going on. What is going on? We must find out what is going on. |
| 0:29.6 | Hi, I'm Danielle Pletka. |
| 0:31.4 | I'm Mark Tesson. |
| 0:32.6 | Welcome to our podcast. |
| 0:34.0 | What the hell is going on? |
| 0:36.5 | What the hell is going on in the conservative movement, Mark? |
| 0:40.3 | Well, there's a big fight going on over Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes and the Heritage Foundation |
| 0:46.6 | and who gets to be part of the conservative movement. I think that's fundamentally what this is about. |
| 0:52.1 | You and I have had many podcasts where we've talked about |
| 0:54.8 | this, and I've written a column about it, but one of the things that I'm proudest of being a |
| 0:58.9 | conservative is that unlike the left, we have done a pretty damn good job of keeping the |
| 1:06.6 | anti-Semites in the fever swamps and not letting them into the mainstream of the conservative |
... |
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