On February 24, Tucker Carlson hosted former Commerce Undersecretary Corey Stewart, who has well-documented ties to prominent white supremacists. The interview focused on alleged ties between American telecommunications company AT&T and China Telecom. (AT&T has issued a statement claiming “the story that aired was misleading and failed to represent all the facts.”)
Stewart is a longtime conservative firebrand who rose to prominence spearheading crackdowns against undocumented immigrants in Prince William County, Virginia, and ran a failed 2018 campaign to unseat Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine. During the campaign, it was revealed that Stewart had ties to prominent white nationalists, including Jason Kessler and Paul Nehlen.
In January of 2017, Stewart met with Nehlen, a white nationalist and anti-Semite, calling him a “personal hero.” Nehlen once appeared on a white nationalist podcast to declare that he supported the murder of Jews. While discussing the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburg, Nehlen stated that he wasn’t "opposed to someone … leading a million Robert Bowers to the promised land,” referring to the perpetrator of the shooting. Nehlen has also lamented that one synagogue shooting hadn’t been livestreamed.
Stewart also has close ties to American neo-Nazi Jason Kessler. Kessler was the organizer of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virgina, which resulted in the murder of Heather Heyer by another neo-Nazi. In 2017, Stewart appeared at an event hosted by Kessler’s organization Unity & Security for America. The event was held in support of removal of a Black member from the Charlottesville City Council, after the member had called for the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from a public park. Kessler endorsed Stewart in his 2017 run for governor, and following Unite the Right, Stewart called fellow Republicans “weak” for apologizing over the events of the rally organized by Kessler.
Stewart has also repeatedly voiced his support for and glorified the Confederacy. Jane Coaston reported for Vox: