That Heritage now finds itself defending Tucker Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes, a man who has praised Hitler, denied the Holocaust, and mocked Jewish suffering, is a symptom of a moral rot spreading through the American right.
Kevin Roberts says, “Christ first, then America always.” He frames this as courage, as standing up to “the globalist class.” But listen closely to what he’s actually saying. It’s not faith or patriotism. It’s the language of power cloaked in religion and stripped of any guardrails.
It is also deeply dishonest.
Nobody is trying to “cancel Christians” for criticizing Israel. Nobody has ever said that disagreeing with Israeli policy makes someone an antisemite, any more than disagreeing with President Trump makes you less of a patriot.
The issue is when you charitably host and defend literal Jew-haters, people who call Jews “vermin” and say the Holocaust didn’t happen, and then pretend that doing so is a defense of free speech.
Roberts says Heritage “won’t cancel our own people.” But that phrase, “our own people,” is doing a lot of work here. Because who exactly does that include now? Are neo-Nazis now “our people”? Is Nick Fuentes, a man who preaches venomous hate against Jews, women, and Black Americans, now under the Heritage tent?
The conservative movement once knew how to draw lines. William F. Buckley exiled the John Birch Society from the mainstream right when it crossed into conspiracy and antisemitism. Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an evil empire because he understood that evil is not relative. It must be named and it must be confronted.
Now, men like Kevin Roberts call evil a “debate partner.”
He claims “we challenge those ideas in debate.” Debate what, exactly? Whether Jews are subhuman? Whether the Holocaust happened? Whether women belong in the kitchen? Whether slavery was good for the South?
No serious moral movement treats those questions as intellectual exercises. They are disqualifying.
Read the whole thing.
And here, as the Carlson-Fuentes bromance could be a mile marker on the road to 2028: Warning: The Tucker Carlson-Nick Fuentes Bigots Are Targeting JD Vance.