The Heritage Foundation is facing a staff rebellion over its president, Kevin Roberts, expressing support of Tucker Carlson following his softball interview with neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes.

After Carlson posted his interview online on Monday, many conservatives urged the foundation to distance itself from the conservative commentator due to Fuentes’s racist and antisemitic views. Fuentes is the founder of the Groypers, a group of internet trolls that praises Hitler as well as white and Christian nationalism.

Instead, Roberts released a video on X Thursday in support of Carlson and Fuentes, calling the former “a close friend of the Heritage Foundation” and saying that “canceling” Fuentes is not the solution, even though he personally abhors what he says. In response, Heritage staff members—including Heritage research fellow Preston Brashers and Richard Stern, the director of Heritage’s economic policy institute and federal budget center—have started criticizing Roberts on social media.

At least a handful of Heritage staffers, including Jason Bedrick, Jay Greene, and John Peluso, also retweeted Brashers’s post. Other conservatives, including Senator Ted Cruz and influencer Bethany Mandel, have also criticized Roberts. The backlash led to Roberts making a follow-up post on Friday condemning Fuentes’s views but reiterating his view “that the best way to fight antisemitic ideas was to challenge them head on.”

  • Basic Glitch@sh.itjust.worksOP
    1·
    24 hours ago

    Right but they’ve also been making a lot of money via the genocide the Israeli government has carried out. They were co-founded by a hardcore antisemitic asshole name Paul Weyrich, but for the last year or so have been doing shit like this: https://www.heritage.org/conservatism/commentary/revolution-principles-and-american-conservatism-now

    On this week’s episode of “The Kevin Roberts Show,” we’re joined by Yoram Hazony, author of the new book, “Conservatism: A Rediscovery.” He’s also host of the National Conservatism Conference, president of the Herzl Institute, and chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation. We dive into a discussion of nationalism, cover the history of the conservative movement, tackle some of the gravest threats to America’s existence emerging from the radical left, and hear why he believes Americans need to return to living more religiously devoted lives.

    While it’s not mentioned in the Heritage Foundation blurb, probably the most important detail about Hazony is that he just happened to be Netenyahu’s former speech writer.

    Coincidentally, Peter Thiel funded the conservative foundation Hazony chairs and wrote a forward for his book.

    So now you have all these different factions within the conservative party who have no loyalty to anyone, but do have to publicly attempt to explain their traditional willingness to embrace antisemitic rhetoric with their recent love affair with the Israeli government. It’s honestly kind of poetic.