Heritage’s Kevin Roberts defended his ‘close friend’ Tucker Carlson for platforming Fuentes on his podcast
Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts said conservatives should not be “canceling” Nick Fuentes, the 27-year-old Hitler and Stalin supporter who said Wednesday that Jews who can’t get behind his world view should “get the fuck out of America and go to Israel.”
Roberts made the remarks in a videotaped statement intended as a defense of Tucker Carlson, whom he described as a “close friend.” Carlson came under criticism this week for hosting Fuentes for a friendly, two-hour interview on his podcast.
“I disagree with and even abhor things that Nick Fuentes says, but canceling him is not the answer either,” Roberts said. “When we disagree with a person’s thoughts and opinions, we challenge those ideas in debate.”
Fuentes delivered an anti-Semitic tirade in the wake of that interview, describing Jewish commentators from Josh Hammer to Mark Levin and Laura Loomer as “despicable pieces of shit” who will “never be American” and should “get the fuck out of America and go back to Israel.”
“Do us all a favor,” Fuentes continued. “We are done with the Jewish oligarchy. We are done with the slavish surrender to Israel, the wars, the foreign aid, the policing of anti-Semitism, the Holocaust religion and propaganda.”
Roberts did not address those remarks or any of Fuentes’s other head-turning statements, including “I love Hitler,” “Hitler had aura,” and “I think the Holocaust is exaggerated.” Rather, he condemned Carlson’s critics.
“We will always defend our friends against the slanders of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda,” Roberts said, though he did not identify whose agenda Carlson’s critics are allegedly serving.
Carlson, he said, “remains—and, as I have said before, always will be—a close friend of the Heritage Foundation. The venomous coalition attacking him or sowing division, their attempt to cancel him will fail.”
On Carlson’s podcast, Fuentes decried the influence of “organized Jewry” and described himself as a “fan” of the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, who reportedly canceled a person or two. Carlson pledged to “circle back to that” but never did.
Roberts also accused Carlson’s critics of unduly focusing on the Right rather than uniting against the Left.
Sitting with Fuentes, Carlson took a different tack, arguing that Christian Zionists like Trump official Mike Huckabee and Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) have a “brain virus” and accusing them of “Christian heresy.”
Fuentes thanked Roberts for his “courage in … defending Tucker against the Israel First Woke Right.”
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