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Heritage Foundation Bigwig Defending Tucker Carlson Platforming Notorious Anti-Semite Accentuates Republican Divisions

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Once upon a time The Heritage Foundation was considered a thoughtful, influential right-wing think tank. It was founded in 1973 and played a key role in during the years of President Ronald Reagan. Its opponents could passionately oppose its ideas and pronouncements and it wasn’t considered way out there in the political Twilight Zone.

That day has (for now) passed.

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts ignited a major firestorm by essentially backing Tucker Carlson’s interview of Nick Fuentes. Many have considered Carlson anti-Semitic for years. Raging anti-Semite Fuente’s favorite song is likely Springtime for Hitler and he probably takes the song seriously.

The issue is whether the Republican Party should embrace anti-Semites because they can provide the party with votes. Roberts based his defense on not wanting to be involved in “cancel culture.”

Roberts particularly enraged many when he said this in a statement that garnered more than 23 million views on X: “We will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda. That includes Tucker Carlson, who remains, and as I have said before, always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation. The venomous coalition attacking him are sowing division. Their attempt to cancel him will fail.”

Which raises the question: aren’t there some people that deserve to be “cancelled” due to their extremism and potential for triggering violence by some of their supporters?

Should everyone be offered a big platform?

The Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post gave this blunt summary of reaction at the once distinguished Heritage Foundation:

One of the largest conservative think tanks in Washington, DC, has been roiled by their president’s embrace of Tucker Carlson after the conservative podcaster hosted white nationalist Nick Fuentes on his show, prompting an outcry from senior staff.

Internal chats reviewed by The Post show high-ranking members of the Heritage Foundation told each other privately how “embarrassed” and “disgusted” they were by Kevin Roberts’ “ridiculous” decision to come to Carlson’s defense over the sitdown with Fuentes, 27, who has expressed anti-Semitic views and denied that the Holocaust happened.

“I’m disgusted by this and don’t understand how this premeditated and orchestrated response could come out of one of the biggest think tanks in the world,” one wrote.

Heritage Foundation staff messaged each other privately about how “embarrassed” and “disgusted” they were by their president, Kevin Roberts’ (pictured) decision to embrace Tucker Carlson after he interviewed the white nationalist Nick Fuentes.

Another declared the incident was “the most embarrassed I’ve ever been to be a Heritage employee. It’s not close.

Meanwhile, many Republicans have been scrambling to distance themselves:

Republican lawmakers and influencers continued on Monday to distance themselves from Tucker Carlson after his sympathetic interview with the prominent white supremacist Nick Fuentes, putting on display a widening split on the right about how to address antisemitism within their party.

The fallout included at least one resignation, as a key aide to the head of a prominent right-wing think tank stepped down after backing his boss’s vigorous defense of Mr. Carlson.

Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation think tank, had announced late last week that the aide, Ryan Neuhaus, was simply leaving his chief of staff position for another role. But on Monday, a spokesman for the Heritage Foundation, said Mr. Neuhaus had resigned. The resignation was reported earlier by The Hill.

Ben Shapiro, the conservative podcast host, also condemned Mr. Carlson on Monday as “the most virulent superspreader of vile ideas in America,” criticizing him for failing to push back on Mr. Fuentes during the interview and for allowing him instead to spread his ideas unchallenged on a huge platform.

On Capitol Hill, Republicans were quick to disavow antisemitism and declare unbending support for Israel, even as some refrained from singling out Mr. Carlson by name.

“There’s already the Democratic Party that is anti-Israel, and is OK with antisemitism,” Senator Rick Scott, Republican of Florida, said in an interview. “We’ve got to be very clear we don’t support antisemitism and we do support Israel.”

The uproar over Mr. Carlson’s interview has created a dilemma for many Republicans in Congress. Many have routinely derided “cancel culture” among progressives and accused the left of intolerance. They have also rejected the idea that conservatives should cast out figures within their own ranks who make indefensible statements.

When a cache of leaked antisemitic, misogynistic and other bigoted texts that circulated among a group of Republican operatives recently surfaced, Vice President JD Vance ridiculed the outraged reaction as “pearl clutching.”

But others, including Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, have argued that Republicans must rid their movement of such viewpoints. Mr. Cruz has positioned himself as one of the party’s loudest voices denouncing antisemitism and appeared especially eager for a hand-to-hand fight with Mr. Carlson.

“It’s a handful of voices that are spreading this garbage, and it is giving every one of us a time for choosing,” Mr. Cruz said at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual leadership summit in Las Vegas on Thursday. “As for me, I choose to stand with you. I choose to stand with Israel, and I choose to stand with America.”

The Wall Street Journal:

Amid criticism on Friday, Mr. Roberts scrambled to list Mr. Fuentes’s odiousness, but his initial contribution was to join in the Jew-baiting. His video framed the issue not as antisemitism, but as Christian freedom of conscience in the face of a hostile attempt to impose loyalty to Israel on Americans.

The danger here goes beyond the podcast cabal and a misguided think-tank leader. Mr. Roberts, always eager to say he knows “what time it is,” apparently thought this was the way to “reach young men,” as his chief of staff and key influence Ryan Neuhaus put it shortly after the Fuentes interview. On Friday Heritage reassigned Mr. Neuhaus to another role.

If conservatives—and Republicans—don’t call out this poison in their own ranks before it corrupts more young minds, the right and America are entering dangerous territory.

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports that there has been a Jewish exodus from the foundation’s antisemitism initiative:

The Heritage Foundation’s marquee effort to combat antisemitism, a coalition known as Project Esther, is rapidly losing members following the conservative think tank’s public defense of Tucker Carlson after he gave a friendly interview to the white nationalist and antisemitic provocateur Nick Fuentes.

At least seven individuals and organizations affiliated with Heritage’s National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, launched last year under the Project Esther banner, have resigned or threatened to do so, citing Heritage president Kevin Roberts’s decision to stand by Carlson and his description of the television personality’s critics as a “venomous coalition.”

The defections suggest that Project Esther — unveiled on the first anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack as a conservative “national strategy to counter antisemitism”— could be imploding.

Neither the co-chairs of the initiative nor the Heritage Foundation immediately responded to a request for comment about the resignations.

Conceived as a counterweight to the Biden administration’s 2023 antisemitism strategy, Heritage’s plan focused almost entirely on left-wing and pro-Palestinian activism, portraying what it called a “Hamas Support Network” as the chief driver of antisemitism in America.

From the outset, the project drew skepticism for not including most mainstream Jewish organizations and for downplaying antisemitism on the political right. That tension has now widened into a rupture.

And:

The first public resignation from the task force came Sunday with an announcement from Mark Goldfeder, an Orthodox rabbi and the CEO of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, that he was quitting in protest of Roberts’ defense of Carlson.

“Elevating him and then attacking those who object as somehow un-American or disloyal in a video replete with antisemitic tropes and dog whistles, no less, is not the protection of free speech. It is a moral collapse disguised as courage,” Goldfeder wrote in a letter posted to X.

On Monday, the New York Post reported on the resignation of David Bernstein, author of “Woke Antisemitism” and founder of the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values, who had served on the Heritage task force. Bernstein said Roberts’ language felt like “a real attack against Jewish political agency on the American scene.”

“The phrase ‘venomous coalition aligned against him [Carlson]’—that’s me and any Jewish person who cares about condemning antisemitism,” Bernstein said. “It allows you to justify almost anything said in the name of political conservatism, and that empties it of all meaning.”

The controversy now involves three Republican factions: (1) Reagan-style conservatives, (2) MAGA Republicans and (3)Groypers, which Wikipedia defines as ” a group of Christian nationalists and white nationalists loosely defined as followers, fans, or associates of Nick Fuentes.”

The Bulwark, in an article titled “Heritage Americans Turn on One Another,” notes that popular conservative commentator Ben Shapiro decimated Carlson and Fuentes on his show:

Ben Sharpiro did something unique on Monday. Not only did he open his show with a fiery intervention in the right’s roiling feud over white nationalist Nick Fuentes—he devoted his entire show to the topic.

“No to the groypers!” Shapiro said at one point, defiantly.

The conservative commentator’s exhortation was the latest shot to be fired in the civil war that has been roiling the right since last week when Tucker Carlson welcomed the racist, antisemitic, Holocaust-denying Fuentes into the conservative mainstream with a friendly interview. It’s a conflict that has consumed the MAGA movement, unnerved activists, drawn in top lawmakers, and left some conservative institutions in a state of upheaval. Shapiro, taking his turn on Monday, called it “the most important thing happening in the country.”

Shapiro focused most of his fire on Fuentes, playing clips of the young far-right podcaster praising Hitler as “really fucking cool” and promoting rape. And he attacked Carlson, saying he had betrayed Charlie Kirk, the assassinated conservative organizer, by giving Fuentes, Kirk’s archenemy, a platform with virtually no pushback.

“Tucker Carlson has seen fit to launder Nick Fuentes, the person who hated Charlie most and who wished him destruction,” Shapiro said. “That’s not an act of friendship, it’s an act of sick evil.”

But Shapiro had a third target that would have seemed baffling just a week ago: the Heritage Foundation, the monolithic conservative think tank that serves as one of the main pillars of the Republican establishment.

In his broadcast, Shapiro suggested Heritage president Kevin D. Roberts had made a serious error in his handling of the Carlson-Fuentes fallout and was failing to lead the American right.

“I hope Kevin Roberts and Heritage show us they can still be those leaders,” Shapiro said. “But if not, we’ll have to look elsewhere.”

So does this suggest Fuentes and his followers are now weaker after this controversy? Not so fast, writes Michael Edison Hayden, a writer and expert on far-right extremism in the U.S.:

Nick Fuentes has said that “Hitler is awesome.” He has said that Jews “have no future in America.” He’s a fascist and his worldview isn’t particularly difficult to understand.

For years, the language Fuentes has used about Jews was enough to inspire the leaders of the traditionally philosemitic, pro-Israel conservative movement to keep the 27-year-old livestreamer somewhat walled off from even the mainstream MAGA movement. For example, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) banned Fuentes in recent years, forcing him to create a parallel event called the America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC) as an alternative.

But a recent slate of friendly media appearances and articles, culminating in a sit-down interview with Tucker Carlson, posted to the former Fox News host’s website on Oct. 27, has shown that the younger, pro-Hitler wing of the MAGA movement that grew up alongside the political ascendancy of Donald Trump will neither grow out of their rhetoric nor fade away. They are, in fact, rapidly defining what MAGA will mean in the years after the nearly octogenarian Trump leaves the stage.