Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) ripped the Heritage Foundation on Friday, as conservatives clash over the organization’s continued embrace of Tucker Carlson in the wake of his friendly interview this week with Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.
“Last I checked, ‘conservatives should feel no obligation’ to carry water for antisemites and apologists for America-hating autocrats,” McConnell, the former Republican Senate majority leader, wrote in a post on X. “But maybe I just don’t know what time it is…”
In the interview, Carlson said Republican supporters of Israel have been “seized by this brain virus.” And Fuentes told Carlson that “organized Jewry” poses the main obstacle to keeping the country together.
But Kevin Roberts, the Heritage Foundation’s president, defended Carlson in a video posted to X Thursday, and even spoke out against deplatforming Fuentes while adding he disagrees with and abhors “things that Nick Fuentes says.”
The real enemy force, Roberts contended, is “the vile ideas of the left.”
In a post on X Friday, Roberts sought to clarify his stance on Fuentes, denouncing among other things, “his vicious antisemitic ideology, his Holocaust denial, and his relentless conspiracy theories that echo the darkest chapters of history.” But counsel, and not cancellation, is the best way to respond, he said.
“Our task is to confront and challenge those poisonous ideas at every turn to prevent them from taking America to a very dark place,” Roberts wrote. “Join us — not to cancel — but to guide, challenge, and strengthen the conversation, and be confident as I am that our best ideas at the heart of western civilization will prevail.”
But McConnell, who has spent the past several months sinceleaving leadership working to safeguard his foreign policy and ideological worldviews within the Republican Party, panned the conservative think tank’s stance.
“The ‘intellectual backbone of the conservative movement’ is only as strong as the values it defends,” he said.
The Heritage Foundation did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
But McConnell isn’t the only Republican senator taking aim at Carlson for his interview.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) also went after the former Fox News host while speaking at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual summit Thursday in Las Vegas. Cruz has long clashed with Carlson over Israel, including on an episode of Carlson’s podcast in July.
“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,” said Cruz.
