Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, told the conservative think tank’s staff on Wednesday morning that he would not resign amid fallout from a video he released in which he defended former Fox News host and current political commentator Tucker Carlson’s interview with Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.
JNS obtained a recording of the confidential, in-house meeting, in which Roberts conceded that he had “made a mistake” backing Carlson in the social-media video that he posted on Thursday.
“I didn’t know much about this Fuentes guy. I still don’t, which underscores the mistake,” Roberts said. “I realized in prayer and in conversations with a lot of friends and colleagues that, in fact, if I made the mess, my moral obligation is to clean it.”
Roberts also apologized for referring to Carlson’s critics as a “venomous coalition,” which he called a “terrible choice of words” and for which he apologized, recognizing that many Jews could interpret the phrase as an antisemitic trope.
During a question-and-answer session that lasted more than an hour, two staff members told Roberts that they no longer had confidence in his leadership. Others expressed doubts that Heritage could repair its reputation without a clear denunciation of Carlson.
Amy Swearer, a senior legal fellow at Heritage, told Roberts that many of her colleagues believed that he should resign but are afraid to say so.
“Dr. Roberts, over the last week, you have shown a stunning lack of both courage and judgment,” Swearer said. “There’s nothing ambiguous about what we saw happen. Tucker Carlson invited a Holocaust-denying neo-Nazi onto his show and then spent roughly two hours doing little more than flirting with him.”
Heritage Foundation Chief Advancement Officer Andy Olivastro told JNS that the leak of the recording of the meeting to the media was “about the swamp and establishment trying to dislodge Heritage, Kevin Roberts and the broader America first movement.”
“Our Heritage team engaged in discussion with our usual spirit of candor,” Olivastro said. “We are grateful for a team that can handle productive and challenging discourse. Our work at Heritage is difficult—but necessary—and requires open dialogue like the one we had today.”
Roberts also had many supporters among those who asked questions in the panel session, including those who supported his original video and were opposed to steps that the foundation had proposed to foster better understanding between Christians and Jews.
“A handful of young colleagues and I had no issue with the points you made in the original video,” one unidentified female staffer said. “Gen Z has an increasingly unfavorable view of Israel, and it’s not because millions of Americans are antisemitic. It’s because we are Catholic and Orthodox and believe that Christian Zionism is a modern heresy.”
Evan Myers, an adviser to Roberts’s office, said that he feared that the “demand” for interns and junior staff to attend Shabbat dinners would violate his Christian faith.
“For many Christians, Friday is a special day of prayer and abstinence to commemorate the death of Christ,” Myers said. “I assume that no staff will be required to attend the Shabbat dinners, but my concern is that these dinners will serve as a sort of informal litmus test.”
Victoria Coates, a vice president at Heritage and co-chair of its National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, said that attending Shabbat dinners was a recommendation and describing that as a “demand” is a “gross mischaracterization.” She added that she took “some offense” at the description.
“It was made in generosity of spirit and in the hopes of increased dialogue on this issue,” Coates said. “Evan, I’m deeply sorry that you could not see that as a generous offer, but rather a personal attack on you. It was not.”
Jewish groups that have resigned from Heritage’s task force over Roberts’s defense of Carlson include the National Jewish Advocacy Center and the Israel Innovation Fund. Other Jewish groups and individuals have also reportedly threatened to withdraw from the project, which does not list all of its participants on its website.
Daniel Flesch, a senior policy analyst at Heritage and veteran of the Israel Defense Forces, said that Tucker’s comments about Jews having dual loyalty to the United States and Israel are evidence of his antisemitism and that Heritage should condemn him.
“When Tucker says that those Americans who serve in the IDF should be stripped of their citizenship—right here, that’s me,” Flesch said. “That’s also one of our colleagues in Israel right now fighting in Gaza.”
“It has been six days, almost a week, where we as an organization have been unable to utter the words, ‘Tucker’s an antisemite,’ and we, as Heritage, do not want to associate with him,” Flesch said. “We still do not have a statement about that.”
Roberts and other Heritage senior staff said that there would be no “retribution” for staffers who had spoken candidly in the meeting, even as much of the meeting was devoted to decrying leaks to the media from within the organization.
“Journalists you’re going to be leaking to will know you’re a low form of humanity,” Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at Heritage, said. “If you speak to a journalist about this, you are probably not going to be found out, but you will know in your heart you’re a Judas, and the journalist will know who you are.”
