Heritage Foundation in a Deep Mess and Apologies Aren’t Enough

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The Heritage Foundation is in a hole that its president, Kevin Roberts, has dug. The question remains how he tries to get out of it now.

For those who have been watching, Roberts kicked off this disaster for the foundation by defending Tucker Carlson – who had just interviewed white supremacist, neo-Nazi, and Stalin fanboy Nick Fuentes on his show for no good reason – except to fluff Fuentes’s ego and for Carlson to appeal to the “groyper” audience. As Carol aptly covered in her post here, the Heritage Foundation president attempted to start repairing the damage on Monday evening, during an event at Hillsdale College, by trying to offer more explanations to his comments regarding Tucker Carlson – but still insisted on sticking by Carlson.

However, the damage being done internally at the Heritage Foundation itself could not be ignored.

The ripple effect from Roberts’ statement has gone beyond staff issues, with sources close to the think tank saying that it has been “hemorrhaging” evangelical Christian and Jewish contributors.

“This is ridiculous, on the one hand, KDR [Roberts] says that we can’t ‘cancel our own people,’ referring to Tucker and Fuentes, when, on the other hand, he literally cancelled the Boston College Republicans by calling them a bunch of ‘soft men‘ to whom the future doesn’t belong,” one Heritage staffer said in the private chat group.

A second asked whether members of the think tank were “part of the venomous coalition for calling out Tucker for playing footsie with literal Nazis?”

“Saying we can’t cancel someone is safe space wokeism,” offered a third.

“If we are labeled on the same side as Nick Fuentes, then we deserve to lose,” chimed in a fourth Heritage colleague, who later added: “Talking with some of the interns I think that there are a growing number of them who actually agree” with the views Fuentes espoused.

Roberts has also stressed that staffers will “absolutely not” face repercussions for speaking out about the incident and its fallout.

“That’s not how we operate at Heritage,” he said over the weekend. “It’s certainly not how I’ve ever operated in a long career of leadership. We value all of our people, appreciate their service, and stand unequivocally with those denouncing antisemitism.”

And then the resignations began. Not the resignation of Roberts’ chief of staff Ryan Neuhaus – which looks to have been more of a shadow firing (more on that later), but actual organizations and individuals from the foundation’s “National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism.” Those who were affiliated with the Heritage Foundation were dropping them like a hot potato.

Mark Goldfeder, CEO of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, became the first to leave it on Sunday, issuing a letter of resignation in which he stated that Roberts’s decision “to defend and even celebrate Tucker Carlson’s decision to platform Nick Fuentes—a figure whose record of overt racism, sexism, and antisemitism is beyond dispute—makes continued participation impossible.”

David Bernstein, author of Woke Antisemitism, also resigned from the task force over Roberts’s remarks, and the Zionist Organization of America demanded that Roberts leave Heritage in its own statement sent Monday.

“Unless Kevin Roberts retracts and apologizes for his praise for Jew-hating Israel-basher Tucker Carlson, who legitimizes and mainstreams antisemites like Nick Fuentes, and publicly condemns and ends Heritage Foundation’s relationship with Tucker Carlson, Roberts is not fit to continue as Heritage Foundation’s president.”

The Coalition for Jewish Values (CJV) cut ties with the Heritage Foundation’s National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism on Tuesday morning, saying in a letter shared with the Washington Free Beacon that the group “cannot grant legitimacy to an effort to combat antisemitism operated by the Heritage Foundation while Heritage is validating antisemitism and giving it a platform.”

All of this led to a staff meeting on Wednesday, where Kevin Roberts attempted to apologize directly to Heritage Foundation staffers.

“I made a mistake and I let you down and I let down this institution. Period. Full Stop,” Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts told the staff of the conservative think tank on Wednesday, a week after he posted a video decrying a “venomous” coalition attacking the right-wing podcast host Tucker Carlson—and declaring the Heritage Foundation would always defend him against “the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda.”

Roberts said he was willing to resign but felt a “moral obligation” to repair the situation and had told the organization’s board of directors: “I made the mess, let me clean it up.”

While Roberts stated unequivocally in his original video that the Heritage Foundation would never cancel “our friends,” he said Wednesday he should have made clear there was a “limiting principle.”

“You can say you’re not going to participate in canceling someone … while also being clear you’re not endorsing everything they’ve said, you’re not endorsing softball interviews, you’re not endorsing putting people on shows, and I should’ve made that clear.”

He added that he wasn’t actually very familiar with the white nationalist, Stalin fan, and J.D. Vance critic Nick Fuentes, with whom Carlson conducted a friendly interview last week on his podcast, though Roberts has spoken several times in recent days about the size of Fuentes’s audience and argued that “canceling” him, given his listenership, which Roberts pegged at 5 million people, will simply make him more popular.

“I didn’t know much about this Fuentes guy,” he said. “I still don’t.”

Roberts said his former chief of staff, Ryan Neuhaus, who has since resigned, wrote the script for the video and deceived him into believing colleagues had approved the message. “Our former chief of staff had the pen,” he said. “When the script was presented to me … I understood from our former colleague that it was approved, it was signed off on by the handful of colleagues who are part of that. Still my fault, I should have had the wisdom to say, ‘Time out, let’s double check this.’”

He went on to apologize for the use of the term “venomous coalition,” describing it as a “terrible choice of words, especially for our Jewish colleagues and friends,” adding that his friend, the Israeli-American scholar Yoram Hazony, the author of The Virtue of Nationalism, traveled to Washington, D.C., to help him stem the self-inflicted crisis.

So, it seems that Roberts is throwing Neuhaus under the bus for the speech, and when it blew up, he attempted to reassign Neuhaus to a different department, but he resigned instead. Even if Neuhaus put the speech in front of Roberts, it is a poor leader who simply reads the script for the cameras without asking questions.

Remember how Roberts insisted that staffers who spoke out would not “face repercussions” for it? About that…

The Washington Free Beacon obtained and reviewed a video of the meeting. “If we see someone leaking, you’re fired,” Eric Korsvall, the organization’s chief operating officer, said during the question and answer portion of the meeting.

The fact that someone recorded the staff meeting, and then gave it to the Free Beacon, even with that threat being issued, means that the Heritage Foundation is in deep trouble. And this apology meeting has not stopped the resignations.

Laurie Cardoza-Moore announced she was withdrawing from the board of the National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, also known as Project Esther, due to Roberts’ embrace of Carlson days after the Fuentes sitdown was released.

“I proudly accepted the invitation to serve on the Heritage Foundation’s Task Force as a tool to fight Jew Hatred, but I am being forced to stand down — unless they draw a clear line in the sand,” said Cardoza-Moore.

“Kevin Robert’s recent statement following Tucker Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes was extremely concerning,” she added. “If the Heritage Foundation wants to stand on the right side of history, they must cut all ties with antisemites.”

Cardoza-Moore, who founded the Christian Zionist group Proclaiming Justice to the Nations, claimed that she had told Carlson “in person and publicly, he is a dangerous antisemite.”

Oh, and remember how Kevin Roberts offered to resign on Wednesday during this staff meeting, though he wanted a chance to fix what he broke? By Wednesday evening, he had changed his mind.

This entire mess – one that has seriously damaged the brand of the Heritage Foundation – is completely of Kevin Roberts’ making.

The question now becomes, what does the Heritage Foundation wish to do with itself? No decent person should listen to, or platform, the excessively vile and gross Nick Fuentes. Betting on Tucker Carlson is a bad idea, because whatever hard and fast conservative ideals he once held, it seems they are gone. I don’t think that Carlson holds the same level of loyalty to the Heritage Foundation that Kevin Roberts has given him. Kevin Roberts says he won’t step down, he wants to “clean up” the mess he made. How, exactly, does he plan on doing that? At this point, platitudes are worthless, and Roberts has to be clear about how he will put the dirt back in the hole he dug. Those who support the mission of the Heritage Foundation have made their voices heard. Now the foundation’s leadership needs to step up.

Featured image: Heritage Foundation logo in front of their building by Ser Amantio di Nicolao via Wikimedia Commons, cropped, CC BY-SA 3.0

The post Heritage Foundation In Deep Mess And Apologies Aren’t Enough appeared first on Victory Girls Blog.

[H/T Victory Girls Blog]



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