By Noah Rothman
Friday, October 31, 2025
Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts wrapped his
arms around Tucker Carlson, and the alternative media host’s friendly interview
with avowed racist Nick Fuentes, in a video message yesterday
that managed to satisfy no one. Nor should it have. The arguments he made in
his and his institution’s defense were evasive at best.
“I’ll have more to say on this in the coming days, but I
want to be clear about one thing,” Roberts began. “Christians can critique the
state of Israel without being antisemitic. And of course, antisemitism should
be condemned.”
So far, this is an unobjectionable non sequitur; a
statement of elementary fact to which few could object because it relates to
nothing in particular.
“My loyalty as a Christian and as an American is to
Christ first and to America always,” Heritage’s president continued. “When it
serves the United States to cooperate with Israel and other allies, we should
do so with partnerships on security, intelligence, and technology. But when it
doesn’t, conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any
foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist
class or from their mouthpieces in Washington.”
This is a strawman — and a familiar one, at that. It gets
a beating whenever rank Jew hatred encounters even the mildest dissent,
allowing purveyors of the world’s oldest hate to retreat into a more defensible
posture. We were only critiquing the geopolitical entity of Israel, and your
obsession with one of many nation-states marks YOU as the monomaniac here! The
notion that those who object to anti-Jewish slurs insist upon “reflexive” —
read, thoughtless and tribalistic — support for the Israeli government’s every
act is false.
What’s more, obviously, Israel’s policies did not inspire
Roberts’s missive. Carlson’s generous efforts to elevate the profile of an
unapologetic racist and antisemite who made the news to which Roberts is
responding by praising Stalin, denouncing “organized Jewry in America,” and
attacking the Christians who support the Jewish State as turncoats — that is
the issue at hand.
Roberts attempted to evade direct engagement with the
subject he pretended to address by swearing off “cancelling our own people or
policing the consciences of Christians, and we won’t stop doing that now.”
Presumably, he’s referring to Carlson as his “own
people,” not Fuentes. But Carlson is ushering Fuentes into Heritage’s circle of
trust, and Roberts seems not to object to that.
Some may hear in Roberts’s appeal to the consciences of
devoted Christians a sectarian signal. Others may hear only an effort to
attribute his own freely chosen irresponsibility to his faith. Regardless, he’s
arguing against a point no one made.
“This is the robust debate we invite, with our
colleagues, our movement friends, our members, and the American public,”
Roberts continued. “We will always defend truth. We will always defend America,
and we will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who
serve someone else’s agenda.”
Here is a subtle accusation that those who object to the
mainstreaming of overt antisemitism are serving “someone else’s agenda.” Where
do their loyalties lie, hmm?
“That includes Tucker Carlson,” Roberts added. “The
venomous coalition attacking him are sowing division.” Are they? Is this
“venomous” claque really the party guilty of “sowing division” here? Not
Carlson, who claimed he “disliked” Christian supporters of Israel “more than
anybody?”
Roberts continued, “Most importantly, the American people
expect us to be focusing on our political adversaries on the left, not
attacking our friends on the right.” This is also absurd. It’s hard to remember
the last time Carlson got attention for attacking the left. His political
project is all but exclusively directed at the right. It is an attempt to
hijack and co-opt it, and Roberts’s institution has supported that effort.
Roberts is not objecting to the policing of his side — the American right, writ
large. He’s doing that himself in this very video, but he’s policing only one
side of this internecine conflict.
“I disagree with, and even abhor, things that Nick
Fuentes says. But cancelling him is not the answer either,” Roberts concluded.
“When we disagree with a person’s thoughts and opinions, we challenge those
ideas in debate.”
This, too, is preposterous. As our editorial detailed, Carlson conspicuously declined
to challenge Fuentes’s ideas on any substantive level — in much the same way he
deferred to Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, although he
denied a similar dispensation to Republican Senator Ted Cruz.
Roberts favorably name-checked Vice President JD Vance,
who notably side-stepped a question at Ole Miss fraught with bigoted
anti-Israel tropes, for the proposition that he is not “okay” with “any country
coming before the interests of American citizens.” Indeed, Roberts added, “It
is important for all of us, assuming we are American citizens, to put the
interest of our own country first.” The implication is that the nebulous
targets of Roberts’s critique don’t share his “allegiance” to the United States.
In short, Roberts’s remarks have nothing to do with
defending the right or Donald Trump. Carlson and the president have had a
frosty relationship of late, and Fuentes campaigned against the president in
2024. This wasn’t a noncommittal declaration of noncombatant status in an
internal conversation on the right. It was an intervention in that conflict on
one faction’s behalf. As we wrote, amid the rise of right-wing antisemitism, it
is “a time for choosing.” This video suggests Roberts is making his choice.
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