Conservative magazine dismantles right-wing think tank's embrace of 'rank Jew hatred'

National Review Senior writer Noah Rothman blasted Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’ embrace of MAGA influencer Tucker Carlson, and the alternative media host’s “friendly interview with avowed racist Nick Fuentes.”

After Carlson posted his interview with Fuentes Monday, conservatives urged the foundation to distance itself from Carlson due to Fuentes’s being the founder of a group of internet trolls that praise Hitler and white Christian nationalism.

But that’s not what Roberts did, said Rothman.

“My loyalty as a Christian and as an American is to Christ first and to America always,” Roberts said instead. “When it serves the United States to cooperate with Israel and other allies, we should do so with partnerships on security, intelligence, and technology. But when it doesn’t, conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class or from their mouthpieces in Washington.”

Rothman called this a “strawman — and a familiar one, at that.”

“It gets a beating whenever rank Jew hatred encounters even the mildest dissent, allowing purveyors of the world’s oldest hate to retreat into a more defensible posture,” Rothman argued. “‘We were only critiquing the geopolitical entity of Israel, and your obsession with one of many nation-states marks YOU as the monomaniac here!’ The notion that those who object to anti-Jewish slurs insist upon ‘reflexive’ — read, thoughtless and tribalistic — support for the Israeli government’s every act is false.”

Additionally, said Rothman, Israel’s military policies did not inspire Roberts’s statement. It was “Carlson’s generous efforts to elevate the profile of an unapologetic racist and antisemite” that is the issue to which Roberts is responding.

Equally cowardly is Roberts’ attempt to “evade direct engagement with the subject he pretended to address” by swearing off “cancelling our own people or policing the consciences of Christians,” said Rothman.

“I disagree with, and even abhor, things that Nick Fuentes says. But cancelling him is not the answer either,” Roberts argued. “When we disagree with a person’s thoughts and opinions, we challenge those ideas in debate.”

Only there was no disagreement with Fuentes by Carson.

“This, too, is preposterous,” Rothman said. “… Carlson conspicuously declined to challenge Fuentes’s ideas on any substantive level,” as Carson has happily done for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).

“As we wrote, amid the rise of right-wing antisemitism, it is ‘a time for choosing.’ This video suggests Roberts is making his choice,” said Rothman.

Read the National Review article at this link.