The Heritage Foundation is one of the major think tanks in the conservative movement. Lately there has been some serious trouble within that think tank. The dust-up is in the reaction to an interview Tucker Carlson did with Nick Fuentes. I question the wisdom of anyone giving a platform to Nick Fuentes, but the interview happened, and there was very little push-back from Tucker Carlson during the interview. Essentially, Tucker Carlson sat quietly by while Nick Fuentes repeated a lot of lies about World War II and about the Jewish people.
On Monday, The New York Post reported:
A senior conservative legal scholar who holds one of Princeton University’s top academic chairs has resigned from the Heritage Foundation’s board in protest of the think tank president’s defense of Tucker Carlson’s interview with white nationalist Nick Fuentes.
Robert P. George, long regarded as one of the right’s leading constitutional thinkers, is the latest figure to step down amid an internal revolt that has already prompted at least seven other staffers, fellows and task force members to sever ties.
His departure came after a leaked video showed Heritage president Kevin Roberts standing behind Carlson in the wake of the host’s podcast appearance with Fuentes.
“I have resigned from the board of the Heritage Foundation. I could not remain without a full retraction of the video released by Kevin Roberts, speaking for and in the name of Heritage, on October 30th,” George wrote in a Facebook post announcing his departure.
“Although Kevin publicly apologized for some of what he said in the video, he could not offer a full retraction of its content. So, we reached an impasse,” he added.
The article notes:
George’s exit is just the latest sign of a widening rupture inside the conservative policy powerhouse, which has been hit by a series of defections since Roberts released the video defending Carlson.
In the clip, Roberts rejected calls to distance Heritage from the former Fox News host and insisted the group would not “cancel” either Carlson or Fuentes, whose extremist record includes Holocaust denial and repeated antisemitic statements.
The backlash was immediate. Members of Heritage’s National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism quit en masse, several scholars and fellows publicly walked away, and Roberts’ own chief of staff stepped down after amplifying posts attacking internal critics.
The only reason to give someone like Nick Fuentes a platform is the show the absolute intellectual vacuity of antisemitism.