The fallout from The Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts pledging loyalty to Tucker Carlson on the heels of the softball interview with neo-Nazi Groyper leader Nick Fuentes continues to reverberate both inside and outside the organization.
Prior Coverage:
Loyalty to Tucker may not bring down The Heritage Foundation, but it’s eating away at it from the inside. He’s a total chaos agent dragging down not only Heritage, but putting JD Vance is a really difficult position. Vance issued a lame statement without mentioning Tucker:
I think it’s idiotic to overreact to a couple of elections in blue states, but a few thoughts: ***3) The infighting is stupid. I care about my fellow citizens–particularly young Americans–being able to afford a decent life, I care about immigration and our sovereignty, and I care about establishing peace overseas so our resources can be focused at home. If you care about those things too, let’s work together.
Tucker’s attack during the Fuentes interview on Christian Zionists, claiming they were heretics who he hated more than anyone, also set off an intra-Christian fight inside Heritage. I don’t claim any knowledge of Christian theology so I didn’t quite understand what Tucker was getting at and how volatile the accusation was, but at Heritage some people understood:
A video from the Heritage Town Hall was leaked. I’m not sure which outlet got it first, but The Free Beacon posted it, and many others have posted clips.
“I made a mistake and I let you down and I let down this institution. Period. Full Stop,” Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts told the staff of the conservative think tank on Wednesday, a week after he posted a video decrying a “venomous” coalition attacking the right-wing podcast host Tucker Carlson—and declaring the Heritage Foundation would always defend him against “the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda.”Roberts said he was willing to resign but felt a “moral obligation” to repair the situation and had told the organization’s board of directors: “I made the mess, let me clean it up.”While Roberts stated unequivocally in his original video that the Heritage Foundation would never cancel “our friends,” he said Wednesday he should have made clear there was a “limiting principle.””You can say you’re not going to participate in canceling someone … while also being clear you’re not endorsing everything they’ve said, you’re not endorsing softball interviews, you’re not endorsing putting people on shows, and I should’ve made that clear.”…Roberts used his remarks to explain how the video came to be posted. “This is an explanation, not an excuse,” he said, telling staffers that the think tank was under pressure to “make a statement” that Carlson was “no longer part of the conservative movement.”
I think it’s unseemly to leak such a thing, but it happened and it’s all over the news, so we can’t ignore it. Here are some clips that have circulated:
One of the staffers gave an impassioned critique of Tucker for promoting and sanitizing not only Fuentes but other Nazi apologists:
“We do cancel … Because if they’re in your movement, you look like clowns. The issue here is Tucker Carlson … Tucker’s show is like stepping into a lunatic asylum.”
But the most important one, perhaps is this one reposted by Roberts himself. It’s of Mike Gonzalez – not sure what his title is but I know he’s done very good work opposing CRT. Gonzalez defended Roberts, and Roberts posted on X:
“I love you brother. I took your advice, went back to my office, and thought about it. I’m staying. I’m all in. I’m here for you. I’m here for the team. Lets go win!”
I don’t know if that will work. Roberts’ duty is to the organization and more broadly to the conservative movement, but he put personal loyalty to Tucker ahead of that.
I don’t understand the grip Tucker has on people. Are they afraid of him? Megyn Kelly has made clear that because of her friendship with Tucker she will not jettison him (I’m not even sure if she has criticized him at all), and she joined in the ridiculous online claims that people who objected to Fuentes distracted from election efforts for Republicans.
It’s getting ugly out there folks, but whether the GOP goes Groyper is a fight that needs to be had now.
More to follow in the coming days.
About 20 minutes after this post went live, Roberts posted another video with the same theme. He still pledges friendship to Tucker, and seems incapable of understanding how damaging and pernicious Tucker has become. Many of the comments to the video are so positive in comparison to the reaction to his prior videos they seem staged to me.
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