Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. There’s been a lot of confusion, discussion, but also confusion, about the idea of platforming some person or deplatforming someone versus canceling them. It came up during the Tucker Carlson interview of Nick Fuentes. I think we should make a distinction.

If you have a venue, you’re a talk-show host, a podcaster, you’re inviting someone to lecture, that’s a choice that you make. And you operate within particular sidelines, parameters. In other words, you don’t invite an abject racist. You don’t invite an abject antisemite. You don’t invite somebody who would like to have that forum to advance your views. And we have to be very clear about this.

People in the news that are antisemites, racist, anti-American, radicals, whatever extremist point of view they embrace, they get to a point of public exposure because they’re quite skilled in demagogic rhetoric. They’re formidable debaters.

If anybody went back to “Firing Line” and watched William F. Buckley debate George Wallace, Buckley had the moral and the intellectual argument on his side. But he was dealing with a man who, for 25 years, had spoken almost every day to crowds. And George Wallace was probably the best orator that ran for president—say, in ’68 and ’72. And Buckley used all of his skills just to tie down Wallace. And it was a very even debate.

So, my point is, if you have a venue and you want to bring somebody in who is beyond the pale, and that person is going to come onto your venue to do a couple of things, of course, get greater exposure for his noxious ideas, but more importantly, he’s coming equipped with formidable rhetorical skills. And three, don’t expect, when he has a large mainstream audience, he is going to voice all of the extreme positions that got him on the show in the first place. That was true of William F. Buckley with Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, William Shockley, etc.

So, when you bring somebody like Nick Fuentes on, be prepared that he’s not going to be transparent about the excess of his views or the extreme nature of them. He’ll calm them down in order to get a bigger audience. Two, he’s going to come after years or hours, days of debating people. So, you have to be at the top of your game.

In the case of Tucker Carlson, there’s no question that he’s a very skilled interviewer. And when he wanted to pin Sen. Ted Cruz down, who, himself, is a formidable debater, Tucker Carlson did very well. I mean, it was almost an ambush interview. And he tried to embarrass—and sometimes, successfully so—Ted Cruz. So, he could have used those formidable skills to cross-examine Nick Fuentes. But he did not.

So, when you don’t invite Nick Fuentes on your program, it doesn’t mean that you’re canceling him. It doesn’t mean that you’re deplatforming him because he’s beyond the pale.

And you say, “Well, who are you to say that, Victor?” Well, I’m not Victor saying that. There are accepted norms—that you don’t use the N-word, or you don’t call for people to go back to Israel, if they’re Jewish, or you don’t make fun of people’s race in the public sphere, the way he did. You can do that, of course, under the First Amendment, but you’re not invited into acceptable venues to vent those views and to spread hate.

The second thing is canceling. These are options. So, when you don’t offer Fuentes a venue, you’re not canceling him out. You’re just making a choice. You make a choice every day, who you invite on your show, who you talk to, where you go. But, if he is so extreme and you decide either to withdraw the invitation or not to invite him at all, that’s not canceling, that’s not deplatforming.

How about Tucker himself, which is a very different case? Tucker Carlson had had a distinguished career as a journalist, as a writer, as a debater, as a conservative pundit for years. I was on his show for six or seven years. He never once voiced anything that was remotely what I would consider antisemitic.

His father was a devout Christian. Maybe he would qualify as a Christian Zionist. A big supporter of Israel. He was a patriot. He had a very distinguished career. Tucker Carlson comes from one of the oldest families in California, the Miller & Lux 19th-century land development company. So, he’s been around for a long time, and no one had ever questioned that he was antisemitic.

I don’t know what happened in the last year or so, when he decided to bring on these beyond-the-pale guests. But I don’t think, necessarily, the question is to go after Tucker Carlson for bringing them on. We don’t go after William Buckley. The question’s more nuanced.

The question is, if you bring them on, are you prepared to ask them the sort of questions that they are, A, going to evade, and B, going to moderate their views, and C, use you to get a larger audience? And if you don’t do that, then fairly or not, people are gonna think you’re complicit in an effort to spread those views, which, in the case of Nick Fuentes, are abhorrent.

So, I think everybody was shocked, disappointed that Tucker didn’t use those skills with somebody as reprehensible as Fuentes. And I think they hope that he will in the future.

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