Spare Us the Friendship Defense

By Abe Greenwald

Friday, November 07, 2025

 

“I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend,” said Thomas Jefferson. A good maxim, if you ask me. Most politically involved Americans these days don’t live by it, which is a shame.

 

But there’s a perverse version of Jefferson’s credo echoing on the right at the moment, and it should be called out. The claim of friendship is being offered up as a defense of indifference to depravity. Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts has talked about his or Heritage’s friendship with Tucker Carlson in every statement he’s made about the latter’s sugary interview of Nick Fuentes. He called him a “close friend” of Heritage in his initial defense of Carlson and has not stopped referencing his personal friendship with him even as he tries to clean up the mess. Megyn Kelly, too, likes to go on about her friendship with Carlson and the importance of standing by friends. There’s a whole circle of pundits and influencers who excuse or dismiss hateful people with the friendship defense.

 

People can disagree with me all they like, but here goes: If you remain close friends with someone who promotes racist or anti-Semitic ideas to pursue evil ends, you’re a bad person. This isn’t about politics because bigotry isn’t fundamentally about politics. It’s about what’s in someone’s heart, which should be the deciding factor in choosing friends.

 

And it’s not guilt by association. Those who use the friendship defense love to note that their friendship doesn’t require them to agree with everything that their friend believes. The problem isn’t that the friendship automatically means you also have malevolent intentions (although you might). It’s that you even could stay friends with someone who spreads evil. That says everything one needs to know about you.

 

Sometimes ending a friendship is the result of a decision. You determine that you’re giving more than you’re getting or that the other person has hurt you in some irreparable way. But other times, you end a friendship because your soul will not permit you to do otherwise. There’s no weighing of costs and benefits, no fine calculating of the other person’s faults. There’s merely an innate response to the genuinely monstrous: repulsion.

 

I know this because I was once getting to be friends with a guy when I learned he was a (prominent) white nationalist. Turns out he was one of those Nazi types who have a creepy admiration for Jews based on a lunatic reading of Jewish particularism and Zionism. Anyway, strange as it sounds, he bore me no personal ill will. But the instant I found out who he really was, he became my enemy.

 

That’s hardly a boast of personal integrity because, as I say, it was in no way a matter of decision-making. There was no thought process at all. It was as involuntary as spitting out rotten food. And the truth is, the instinct to reject contaminated people can be just as lifesaving.