A Heritage Foundation board member resigned after the organization’s president defended Tucker Carlson‘s interview with white nationalist Nick Fuentes.
Robert P. George, McCormick professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University, joins an exodus of foundation staffers who have fled as a result of Kevin Roberts’s defense of Carlson.
Roberts has since apologized for backing Carlson in a video in which he said he would not bow to the “venomous coalition” trying to “cancel” Carlson over his interview with Fuentes, who is an ardent opponent of Israel. In the interview with Carlson, Fuentes said Jews are “a stateless people” and “unassimilable.”
Fuentes said you could not “divorce Israel and the neocons and all those things that you talk about from Jewishness: ethnicity, religion, identity,” adding that he sees “Jewishness” as a common denominator among his enemies on the Right.
Roberts said Israel should be open to criticism from conservatives.
“Christians can critique the state of Israel without being antisemitic,” he said in the video, for which he received swift internal backlash.
Heritage Foundation fellow Amy Swearer shamed Roberts for his “stunning lack of both courage and judgment” in defending Carlson’s interview. Swearer reportedly said some employees want him to quit.
“Dr. Roberts, over the last week, you have shown a stunning lack of both courage and judgment,” she said. “There’s nothing ambiguous about what we saw happen. Tucker Carlson invited a Holocaust-denying, neo-Nazi on to his show and then spent roughly two hours doing little more than flirting with him.”
George is one of the top names to resign from the organization, but myriad others fled before him in reaction to the scandal. The Washington Examiner reached out to the Heritage Foundation for comment on the resignations and asked for a list of those who have departed, but received no response.
Robert P. George
George said Monday that he “could not remain” at the Heritage Foundation without a “full retraction” of Heritage President Kevin Roberts’s defense of Carlson’s interview with Fuentes.
“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 said in a Facebook post. “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.”
Despite the video, George said he believes Roberts is a “good man.”
“He made what he acknowledged was a serious mistake,” he wrote. “Being human myself, I have plenty of experience in making mistakes. What divided us was a difference of opinion about what was required to rectify the mistake.”
A Heritage Foundation spokesperson told The Hill that George, a Heritage Foundation trustee since 2019, is also a “good man.”
“He is a good man, and we look forward to opportunities to work together in the future,” the spokesperson said. “Under the leadership of Dr. Roberts, Heritage remains resolute in building an America where freedom, opportunity, prosperity, and civil society flourish. We are strong, growing, and more determined than ever to fight for our republic.”
George said earlier this month that he would not “expand” the conservative tent to include white supremacists, racists, antisemites, and others.
“Though I welcome conservatives representing a range of viewpoints on a wide swath of issues, I will not—I cannot—accept the idea that we have ‘no enemies to the right,’” he wrote in a post on X.
“The white supremacists, the antisemites, the eugenicists, the bigots, must not be welcomed into our movement or treated as normal or acceptable,” he added.
George said he hopes the country will maintain its founding vision of equal rights for all, and that abandoning it signs “the death certificate of republican government and ordered liberty.”
“I pray that Heritage’s research and advocacy will be guided by the conviction that each and every member of the human family, irrespective of race, ethnicity, religion, or anything else, as a creature fashioned in the very image of God, is ‘created equal’ and ‘endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights,’” George said.
“The anchor for the Heritage Foundation, and for our Nation, and for every patriotic American is that creed,” he added. “It must always be that creed. If we hold fast to it even when expediency counsels compromising it, we cannot go wrong. If we abandon it, we sign the death certificate of republican government and ordered liberty.”
Antisemitism Task Force
At least six members of the foundation’s task force have also resigned.
Members of the task force who have left Heritage include: National Jewish Advocacy Center Director Mark Goldfeder, Executive Vice President for the Coalition for Jewish Values Rabbi Yaakov Menken, Woke Antisemitism author David Bernstein, Evangelical Christian Zionist activist Laurie Cardoza-Moore, Deborah Project Legal Director Lori Lowenthal Marcus, and attorney Ian Speir.
Most of them cited a mistrust in either Roberts or the foundation as a result of his defense of Carlson’s platforming of a known white nationalist.
Speir resigned after saying he believed Roberts’s apology was “tepid” at best and that the issue was not Carlson’s cancellation, but his defense of Carlson after platforming Fuentes.
“Roberts still thinks the issue is ‘cancellation’ of Tucker Carlson. That’s a red herring,” he wrote on X.
“No one is canceling Tucker. The issue is Roberts’ defending Tucker after he platformed and coddled one of the most virulent antisemites in America today. And Roberts now admits his motivation was to try to attract groypers and the groyper-adjacent into the conservative movement. This is a tepid apology at best,” he added.
Goldfeder posted his resignation letter on X and said that he cannot “serve under someone who thinks Nazis are worth debating.”
Bernstein took issue with Roberts’s choice of the words “venomous coalition” specifically. “The language that to me was most problematic was a ‘venomous coalition’ aligned against him [Carlson] — because that’s me and any Jewish person who cares about condemning antisemitism,” he said.
Rabbi Menken pulled his Coalition for Jewish Values organization out of the task force. He said he would require either a “complete reversal” of Roberts’s position, including his “alarming” backing of Carlson, or Roberts’s resignation to come back.
Cardoza-Moore resigned a day after saying she would only be involved in the foundation if they “cut all ties with antisemites,” and Marcus said “the edifice of Heritage is no longer one which I can trust” despite well-crafted but “tone-deaf” apologies.
Scholars
Several scholars, including economist Stephen Moore, have tendered their resignations from the foundation, leaving intellectual voids in the organization.
Moore is a former Trump adviser. He did not mention Roberts’s actions in his resignation note, but stated that he chose to “resign my position as senior visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation to concentrate my workload on continuing to build up @Comm4Prosperity and the mounting influence of our daily Hotline.”
Chris DeMuth, a former distinguished fellow at the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies, resigned without a given reason. He had crafted conservative public policy for decades, and the foundation called him an “invaluable figure” in the conservative movement.
Visiting fellow at Heritage’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, Adam Mossoff, who is also a George Mason University law professor, said that Roberts’s actions were “indefensible” in a letter to the Heritage head. His words offered the most scathing criticism of the scholars.
“Even with your mixed messages, one thing is clear: By your words and actions, Heritage is wedded to Tucker and everything he has come to represent on the periphery of the Groyper movement created by Fuentes,” Mr. Mossoff said in the letter shared with The Washington Times. “Instead of the truth, you have chosen a false friend of the American ideals that Heritage has represented.”
Ryan Neuhaus, Roberts’s former chief of staff, who expressed support for his boss after the Carlson backlash, was initially reassigned before tendering his resignation. He also serves as a Lincoln fellow for the Claremont Institute.
Trump joins Roberts in coming to Carlson’s defense
Roberts was not alone in defending Carlson’s hourslong interview of Fuentes on Oct. 27.
President Donald Trump chimed in on Sunday, saying people “can’t tell [Carlson] who to interview.”
“We’ve had some great interviews with Tucker Carlson, but you can’t tell him who to interview,” Trump told reporters. “I mean, if he wants to interview Nick Fuentes — I don’t know much about him, but if he wants to do it, get the word out, let him. You know, people have to decide. Ultimately, people have to decide.”
“Meeting people, talking to people — like for somebody like Tucker, that’s what they do,” Trump said. “You know, people are controversial. Some are; some aren’t.”
In 2022, Trump hosted Fuentes, who was a guest of rapper Kanye West, at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. However, the president maintained on Sunday that he didn’t know who Fuentes was then.
WHY THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION DRAMA OVER ANTISEMITISM HAS DIVIDED THE CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT
“Kanye asked if he could have dinner, and he brought Nick,” Trump said. “I didn’t know Nick at the time.”
Fuentes, who did not support Trump in the 2024 election but is aligned with the MAGA movement, thanked the president for mentioning him. “Thank you Mr. President!” Fuentes wrote on X.