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(November 5, 2025 / The Jewish Chronicle) The Heritage Foundation could have avoided the whole maelstrom. Really, nobody expected Kevin Roberts, president of the Trump-aligned think tank, to ardently defend podcaster Tucker Carlson on Thursday last week. Carlson had invited the right’s fury by posting a chummy interview with Hitler and Stalin fan Nick Fuentes — on the seventh anniversary of Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue massacre no less. Roberts then released a video defending Carlson, leaving Jews affiliated with Heritage’s efforts to combat Jew-hatred in a decidedly awkward position.
Roberts tweeted he was responding to “speculation that @Heritage is distancing itself from @TuckerCarlson”. He stated that “Christians can critique the state of Israel without being antisemitic.” He insisted that “conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class.”
He promised to defend Heritage’s “close friend” Carlson from “bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda.” And Roberts deemed Carlson’s critics “a venomous coalition” that’s “sowing division,” as if Carlson hadn’t told Fuentes he dislikes Christian Zionists – who are integral to the Republican coalition – “more than anyone” and believes they have a “brain virus”.
On Friday, Roberts detailed what he “abhor[s]” about Fuentes’s views. Again, Roberts sidestepped criticism of Carlson, who’d spent his interview softening Fuentes’s extremism.
Roberts’s video contrasted sharply with Heritage’s history of championing the US-Israel relationship and not countenancing Jew-hatred. Building on Heritage’s 2024 “Project Esther: A national strategy to combat antisemitism”, Heritage’s national task force to combat antisemitism even involved outsiders in that work. Those outsiders won’t forget last week, though, and dominoes have started falling.
On Friday, Zionist Organization of America president Morton Klein told me, “Roberts’s vile statement legitimizes Tucker Carlson’s mainstreaming [of] Holocaust denial, Israel-bashing and Jew-hatred, by Carlson giving platforms to irrational Israel-haters and not pushing back against their antisemitic statements and even nodding in approval during his interviews with these racists. So, we are urging that Roberts and the Heritage Foundation immediately retract and apologize [for] his outrageous statements, and we’re reconsidering our participation in the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther.” (ZOA announced its departure Monday evening.)
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