Heritage Foundation head defends Tucker Carlson for hosting white nationalist with antisemitic views

Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation, speaks at the National Religious Broadcasters convention at the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center Feb. 22, 2024, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)

WASHINGTON — The president of a prominent Republican-aligned think tank defended conservative media personality Tucker Carlson after he offered a platform to a far-right activist known for pushing white nationalist and antisemitic views.

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts posted a video to social media Thursday in which he denied that the group was “distancing itself” from the former Fox News host after Carlson’s podcast hosted Nick Fuentes, whose followers see themselves as trying to preserve America’s white, Christian identify.

Roberts’ video drew sharp rebukes from some prominent Jewish leaders from both parties.

Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish member of Congress, called the statement “deeply disturbing, an embrace of antisemitism and white supremacist conspiracy theories, all while trafficking antisemitic conspiracy theories of `globalist’ powers that control US policy.”

He urged anyone aligned with the foundation to disavow the “mainstreaming of these hateful ideologies.”

Matt Brooks, CEO of the Republican Jewish Coalition, condemned Roberts’ post in a statement to Jewish Insider. He said he was “appalled, offended and disgusted that he and Heritage would stand with Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes as somehow being acceptable spokespeople within the conservative movement.”

Carlson, one of the most powerful voices on the right, has been critical of U.S. support for Israel in its war with Hamas and has come under fire for his own far-right views, including the white-supremacist theory that says whites are being “replaced” by people of color.

He began his career working for the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s, has a broad online following and is often mentioned as a potential future presidential candidate.

Roberts’ post alluded to a rift among conservatives over how far the U.S. should go in its support of Israel, saying they “should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class or their mouthpieces in Washington.”

He went on to characterize Carlson as “a close friend” of the think tank.

“The Heritage Foundation didn’t become the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement by cancelling our own people or policing the consciences of Christians, and we won’t start doing that now,” he said.

The foundation has been a nerve center for the conservative movement for decades, developing policy, coordinating political messaging and connecting activists.

But it earned the ire of then-former President Donald Trump and his campaign during the 2024 presidential race when its Project 2025 -- a nearly 900-page guidebook for a sweeping conservative overhaul of the federal government -- became a core talking point for Democrats.

Many former and future Trump administration officials authored sections of the project, and several plans it outlined have since become policy in the current administration. But Trump’s campaign leaders assailed the group for releasing the plan, complaining they were forced to respond to a slew of unpopular policy ideas, some of which Trump had never embraced.

It’s not the first time Fuentes has stirred controversy. Trump hosted Fuentes for dinner at his Mar-a-Lago resort in 2022, an encounter Trump at the time called “quick and uneventful.” Fuentes’ visit to Trump’s estate was condemned by numerous Republicans, including former Vice President Mike Pence, who said it was wrong for Trump “to give a white nationalist, an antisemite and Holocaust denier, a seat at the table.”

Trump said he had not previously met Fuentes and “knew nothing about” him.

Roberts’ social media post comes during a growing debate among conservatives over the U.S.-Israel relationship -- a debate that has been roiling the Democratic Party for years -- and the role of Christian nationalism in an “America First” foreign policy.

“Christians can critique the state of Israel without being antisemitic,” Roberts said in his video, while condemning antisemitism.

Vice-President JD Vance recently raised eyebrows for his response to a question from a student at a Turning Point USA event who asked why the U.S. was spending foreign aid money on the “ethnic cleansing in Gaza” and who said that Judaism, as a religion, “openly supports the prosecution of ours.”

Vance responded without addressing the premise of the question, and instead stressed the administration’s “America First” approach.

“Sometimes they have similar interests to the United States and we’re going to work with them in that case. Sometimes they don’t have similar interests to the United States,” he said of Israel, adding: “When people say that Israel is somehow manipulating or controlling the president of the United States, they’re not controlling this president of the United States.”

Matt Brown, The Associated Press

Associated Press writer Jill Colvin in New York contributed to this report.