Follow Tucker Carlson and you’ll fall off a cliff

Roberts’s video contrasted sharply with Heritage’s history of championing the US-Israel relationship and not countenancing Jew-hatred. Building on Heritage’s 2024 “Project Esther: A national strategy to combat antisemitism”, Heritage’s national task force to combat antisemitism even involved outsiders in that work. Those outsiders won’t forget last week, though, and dominoes have started falling.

On Friday, Zionist Organisation of America president Morton Klein told me, “Roberts’s vile statement legitimises Tucker Carlson’s mainstreaming [of] Holocaust denial, Israel-bashing and Jew-hatred, by Carlson giving platforms to irrational Israel-haters and not pushing back against their antisemitic statements and even nodding in approval during his interviews with these racists. So, we are urging that Roberts and the Heritage Foundation immediately retract and apologise [for] his outrageous statements, and we’re reconsidering our participation in the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther.” (ZOA announced its departure Monday evening.)

On Sunday morning, Mark Goldfeder, CEO of the National Jewish Advocacy Centre tweeted his resignation letter, noting Heritage’s task force “has done valuable work. But ... I cannot serve under someone who thinks Nazis are worth debating.” Goldfeder’s letter criticised “elevating [Carlson], and then attacking those who object as somehow un-American or disloyal, in a video replete with antisemitic tropes and dog-whistles no less, is not the protection of free speech: it is moral collapse disguised as courage.”

Goldfeder subsequently messaged, “There is a lot of conflation. Conflating criticism of Israel with outright antisemitism to create a straw man argument, conflating cancelling with not giving an uncritical platform, and conflating Tucker and Fuentes. The problem was never whether Roberts knows Fuentes is a Nazi; we all do. The problem is he supports Tucker fan-girling over a Nazi.”

Sunday evening saw another resignation. David Bernstein, CEO of the North American Values Institute, told me, “Once Kevin Roberts called the people who were opposing antisemitism, Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson ‘a venomous coalition,’ it was clear that the organisation hadn’t fully internalised the fight against antisemitism.”

It was, Bernstein observed, “very hard as long as Kevin Roberts is at the helm … for Heritage to fully walk it back” as “there was so much innuendo and hostility in his original statement.” He also expressed sadness “that the leader of a vaunted organisation with really good people couldn’t stand on principle against radical voices in his own movement.”

Then the Coalition for Jewish Values spoke out. CJV executive vice- president Rabbi Yaakov Menken messaged, “Heritage cannot be a constructive part of an effort to stop antisemitism while it is giving antisemitism authenticity and a platform.” Menken further explained, “We immediately told the head of the task force that we intend to resign, but gave time to elicit a full apology from Mr Roberts, including four specific demands. Alternatively, the task force could leave the Heritage Foundation, or the Board could decide that Mr Roberts has to step down. Those are the only three paths I can see to our continued participation.” On Tuesday, the CJV announced its resignation from the task force “with regret”.

Heritage’s board now faces some important decisions: Do they trust Roberts’s judgment? How can they repair last week’s damage? And most crucially, will Heritage be sticking with Trump’s MAGA coalition and avoid following Carlson over a cliff?