'You are a coward': Republicans erupt after conservative leader defends extremist

31 October

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) at the CPAC Texas 2022 conference in Dallas on August 5, 2022 (Lev Radin/Shutterstock.com)

Prominent conservatives are rebuking Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation — the organization behind Project 2025 and self-described “intellectual backbone” of the conservative movement — after he threw his support behind right-wing political commentator and podcaster Tucker Carlson, now under fire for platforming far-right extremist leader Nick Fuentes this week.

The editors of the right-wing National Review in a scathing editorial explained: “Tucker Carlson, knee-deep already, has taken another step into the muck with a friendly interview with Nick Fuentes.”

“The issue isn’t merely that Carlson ‘platformed’ a white-nationalist influencer,” they wrote. “The deeper problem is that Carlson didn’t actually challenge any of Fuentes’s noxious views that he has spelled out quite clearly over the years. Fuentes has engaged in Holocaust denial, called Adolf Hitler ‘really f– cool,’ and said that if his movement gained power, it would execute ‘perfidious Jews.'”

The editors continued: “In his appearance, Fuentes stated that the ‘big challenge’ to unifying the country against tribal interests was ‘organized Jewry in America,’ and he expressed admiration for Soviet butcher Joseph Stalin. He did not receive any pushback from Carlson.”

In a video rushing to Carlson’s defense, Roberts declared, “The Heritage Foundation didn’t become the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement by canceling our own people or policing the consciences of Christians. And we won’t start doing that now.”

Instead, he framed the controversy surrounding Carlson and Fuentes as “the robust debate we invite, with our colleagues, our movement friends, our members, and the American public,” while vowing to “always defend truth.”

And Roberts insisted that “we will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda. That includes Tucker Carlson, who remains, and as I have said before, always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation.”

He vowed that the “attempt to cancel him will fail,” and said that “canceling” Fuentes is also “not the answer” — before denouncing “the vile ideas of the left.”

U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) in remarks made at a Republican Jewish Coalition gathering, said:

“If you sit there and nod adoringly while someone tells you that Winston Churchill was the villain of World War II, if you sit there and nod while someone says, ‘Well, there’s a very good argument that America should have intervened on behalf of Nazi Germany in World War II.’ If you sit there with someone who says Adolf Hitler was very, very cool and that their mission is to combat and defeat global Jewry, and you say nothing, then you are a coward, and you are complicit in that evil.”

As Jewish Insider reported, Cruz “did not mention the Heritage Foundation, Roberts, Carlson or Fuentes by name, though he accused anyone who uncritically promotes Adolf Hitler of being ‘complicit’ in spreading virulent antisemitism.”

Jewish Insider also reported that the head of the Republican Jewish Coalition, Matt Brooks, told the news outlet, “I am appalled, offended and disgusted that [Roberts] and Heritage would stand with Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes as somehow being acceptable spokespeople within the conservative movement.”

Brooks added, “obviously there’s going to be a reassessment of our relationship with Heritage in light of this.”

U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the former longtime Republican Leader, responded to Roberts’ video with biting condemnation: “The ‘intellectual backbone of the conservative movement’ is only as strong as the values it defends.”

“Last I checked, ‘conservatives should feel no obligation’ to carry water for antisemites and apologists for America-hating autocrats. But maybe I just don’t know what time it is…”

Right-wing commentator Erick Erickson, in a lengthy rebuke, blasted Roberts (and numerous other targets): “Kevin Roberts could have chosen to criticize Carlson as a friend. Kevin could have chosen silence. Instead, he picked the worst possible option of dismissing very legitimate criticism and did so in the most straw-man possible way.”

“I also know what Kevin Roberts, J.D. Vance, and others are doing as they dance around some of these guys, Erickson wrote. “They want to attract young zoomers to their side, many of them male, and they think the way to do that is to punch back hard at critics, refuse to fold to criticism, and show a high tolerance for inflammatory positions that rile up the left.”

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