There was a lot to digest online this week. There’s a brutal, merciless slaughter of civilians in Nigeria and Sudan.

The silence is deafening. Civilian men, women, and children are being slaughtered in Sudan. Estimates of over 150,000 killed & 14 million displaced since April 2023. Considered the world’s largest humanitarian crisis. No mass protests. No daily political statements/demands. No college campus encampments.

More is unraveling about Arctic Frost, in which the fanatical prosecutor Jack Smith, with the aid of a fiercely partisan Judge James Boasberg, surveilled 20% of the Republican senators, their donors, media companies, including Fox News, Fox Business, Newsmax, OANN, and Sinclair, and conservatives while blocking disclosure to them of the dragnet.

But this week I want to concentrate on the drama at Heritage. I see it as a turning point for American conservatives, illustrating the cowardice of Kevin Roberts, head of one of the most prestigious conservative domestic organizations.

Let me begin with a bit of psychological background. Tucker Carlson has clearly gone off the rails. Curiously, he has said that he dislikes Christian Zionists more than he hates anyone else on the planet. I say "curiously" because he wrote a loving obituary for his father, Ambassador Richard Carlson, who died this March and was a well-known Christian Zionist, a vice chair of the Foundation for Defense of Democracy which supports Israel and the Jewish people. Carlson has specifically targeted “Christian Zionists” Senator Ted Cruz, former president George W. Bush, and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee.

You might think Heritage would want to distance itself from Carlson, but when the issue was met after Carlson’s powderpuff interview and nodding agreement with his guest Nick Fuentes, Heritage dropped the ball, disagreeing with Fuentes but protecting Carlson, even as it stripped Carlson from its list of donor recommendations. Analyzing Roberts’ initial statement (which he was under no compulsion to issue that I can see), he magnified his errors in an equally botched effort at damage control. What hold does Carlson have on Roberts and how long will it take for the organization’s board of directors to ask for his resignation? Fuentes is not the issue, Carlson is.

Nick Fuentes

Nick Fuentes is a small man with poisonous notions. He has called Hitler “really f*cking cool.” 

Fuentes questioned JD Vance's loyalty to the anti-immigrant movement and the "great replacement theory" because his wife, Usha, is a daughter of Indian immigrants. Fuentes asked: "Do we really expect that the guy who has an Indian wife and named their kid Vivek is going to support white identity?

He has called for imposing a death sentence on “perfidious Jews.”

Nick Fuentes and his crude, folkish, nasty cult of “Groypers” as they call themselves, many of whom embrace his traditionalist ideology, find in the reactionary Catholic authors of early twentieth century Europe a kind of justification for this scapegoating of the Jews, and confirmation that Jews have been working against their ideals of civilization for generations (even if these lies equally deluded these earlier authors). The data that gives rise to these theories is often nothing more than a recognition of the common Jewish interest in survival and emancipation, not any consensus about political regimes or animosity toward Christians. Other times, it is based on recognition of the disproportionate success of Jews, which, for whatever odd reason, breeds resentment among insecure people who obsess about how many Jews are in things.

In Carlson’s interview with Fuentes, this is all clear, with Fuentes stating that his political worldview is against “organized Jewry in America,” to which Carlson happily nods without any opposition, unlike his reaction to the ideas of Ted Cruz or other proponents of Israel. Anyone who has paid attention to Carlson over the last couple of years is not entirely surprised, as he has become increasingly obsessed with the Jewish influence on American politics, even if he is more veiled in his choice of words. Even in the interview with Fuentes, Carlson calls Christian Zionism a “heresy.”

This interview triggered outrage on social media, even among some rather right-wing populist accounts. And yet, even after this Fuentes interview, Kevin Roberts, President of the Heritage Foundation, not only refused to distance himself or the Heritage Foundation from Carlson, but explicitly reaffirmed the partnership between Heritage and Carlson. This, despite the overwhelming evidence of his decline into right-wing antisemitic conspiracy theories. That is a gamble, to say the least. The elasticity of the Republican base has exceeded all expectations to date, but it is not infinite. Tucker Carlson’s embrace of Nick Fuentes might perhaps be what finally divides the base between those who want to remain on Carlson’s sinking ship, a group more likely to support J.D. Vance, and those who would rather return to more traditional conservatives like Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Nikki Haley, Brian Kemp, Spencer Cox, or Ron DeSantis. We will have to wait and see. But it should be clear to all that what Carlson is defending is closer to what our parents and grandparents fought against in World War II than anything that can be called American conservatism.

Here is the initial statement Roberts issued, in which he dishonestly equates criticism of Fuentes with censorship and indicates we ought not criticize Carlson, who promotes Fuentes, and visibly appears to agree with Carlson, in particular his comment that “the venomous coalition attacking [Tucker] are sowing division.”

That obviously didn’t fly, and a day later he issued something certainly drafted by a crisis management team. This time he specifically denounced Fuentes’ “vicious antisemitic ideology, his Holocaust denial, and his relentless conspiracy theories that echo the darkest chapters of history.”

We are disgusted by his musings about rape, women, child marriage, and abusing his potential wife. Fuentes made grotesque analogies to try to cast doubt on the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust and has said “I think the Holocaust is exaggerated. I don't hate Hitler.” Fuentes called for the death penalty for “perfidious Jews” and other non-Christians, stating that “when we take power, they need to be given the death penalty.” Fuentes praised Hitler and in the Tucker interview said he is a “Stalin admirer.” Fuentes stated that his goal is “total Aryan victory” and claimed that "black people should be in prison for the most part." This is but a sampling of his vile daily rhetoric. Racism and antisemitism are not relics of the past. They have blossomed on the Left on university campuses and grown on the Right through figures like Fuentes. Nick Fuentes's antisemitism is not complicated, ironic, or misunderstood. It is explicit, dangerous, and demands our unified opposition as conservatives. Fuentes knows exactly what he is doing. 

But William A. Jacobson of Legal Insurrection nails it: “Fuentes is not the main issue. Tucker and his normalization and stoking of Jew hatred (Fuentes was just one of many such guests) is the issue.”

I’m not sure that Roberts is actually diligent or smart enough to continue to hold his post. Shortly after his second statement Dana Loesch interviewed him and asked him whether it was “venomous” (to say as did Carlson) that you hate "Christian Zionists?” After a deer in the headlights look, Roberts concedes it is. That’s as close as he ever came to acknowledging Carlson’s incompatibility with Roberts’ organization and his own failures to publicly distance himself from him.

It should be a heated time this weekend in the Heritage boardroom.