An antisemitism task force affiliated with the Heritage Foundation announced on Thursday that it would cut ties with the conservative institution, as the prominent think tank has come under fire for its defense of Tucker Carlson after the firebrand podcaster hosted neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes for a friendly interview. 

The co-chairs of the National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism announced in a Thursday email, viewed by Jewish Insider, that they will continue their work “outside the Heritage Foundation for a season.” 

A member of the task force told JI that its members had not ruled out working with Heritage again if the organization improves. “We hope that one day we’ll be able to collaborate with Heritage again,” said the member, who requested anonymity to talk about confidential discussions.

The task force was formed following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks and was instrumental in the drafting of Project Esther, Heritage’s signature counter-antisemitism framework released last year in response to the Biden administration’s national strategy to combat antisemitism. 

The Project Esther report made no mention of antisemitism on the political right. In their Thursday email, the co-chairs of the task force said they can no longer ignore it.

“The NTFCA will also now expand our work to fight the rising scourge of antisemitism on the Right, beyond our previous work combating the pro-Hamas movement on the Left,” wrote the co-chairs, announcing that they will co-host a conference on “Exposing & Countering Extremism and Antisemitism on the Right” on Nov. 18 in Washington, in partnership with the Conference of Christian Presidents for Israel. 

The task force’s leaders are Mario Bramnick, a Florida pastor and president of the Latino Coalition for Israel; Victoria Coates, vice president of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at the Heritage Foundation; Ellie Cohanim, who served as deputy antisemitism special envoy in the first Trump administration; and Luke Moon, a pastor and executive director of the Philos Project. 

The Heritage Foundation has been awash in controversy since its president, Kevin Roberts, released a video last week defending Carlson as the conservative commentator faced criticism for his interview with Fuentes. 

In a staff meeting on Wednesday, Roberts apologized for the video, which remains on X. He acknowledged the video did not go far enough in making clear that although he is opposed to “canceling” anyone, including Carlson, he is not thereby “endorsing everything they’ve said.”

Still, he has resisted requests to remove the video, according to a source familiar with the deliberations. Deleting the video was one of the recommendations made earlier in the week by the task force members.

The four task force co-chairs pledged to continue the work they had started with the support of the Heritage Foundation, which played a major role in the task force’s launch and operations, according to the task force member. The organization gave the task force access to meeting rooms, publishing resources and research assistance, as well as paid administrative and policy staff members. The task force co-chairs did not say where the group would go next. 

“The future of the Conservative movement will include a broad coalition of people that love America and all she stands for,” the co-chairs wrote. “We cannot allow the Conservative movement to be corrupted and destroyed by those consumed with attacking America’s Judeo-Christian heritage and values, thereby distracting us all from the real challenges facing our nation.” 

This story was updated at 6:31 p.m.

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts apologized in a staff meeting on Wednesday for  his video last week defending Tucker Carlson and refusing to “cancel” neo-Nazi leader Nick Fuentes, saying that the video was the result of internal failures of communication and consultation that left too few people involved in its production.

Roberts and other Heritage leaders also repeatedly made reference to a plan under development for how Heritage will approach its relationship with Carlson going forward, amid strong pressure from numerous staff members to forcefully disavow the right-wing podcast host  and his activities, but provided little clarity about what that approach will entail and sidestepped the full-throated denunciation of Carlson that several Heritage staffers sought.

In opening remarks, Roberts said ultimate responsibility for the video lay with him, but that Heritage’s former chief of staff, Ryan Neuhaus, who recently resigned, was responsible for writing the script. Roberts also criticized Neuhaus for retweeting a post saying that those upset by Roberts’ video should resign.

Roberts said that he himself was willing to resign but that he also felt a “moral obligation” to stay on to clean up the “mess” he created.

Roberts said that the video was the result of a “short circuited” process which violated Heritage’s “one voice” policy, adding that he wrongly believed the script had been approved by others in Heritage’s leadership, but that he should have personally checked in with colleagues.

“Some of the substance, maybe most of the substantive points, are things that I and I think we believe, but there are a couple of pain points that I want to address specifically,” Roberts said. 

He said that the intention of the video was to address public and private pressure on Heritage to disavow Carlson as well as to denounce the antisemitic and otherwise “grotesque” stances maintained by Fuentes, the latter of which he addressed in a separate post following backlash to his video. 

But Roberts also largely pleaded ignorance about both Carlson and Fuentes’ views and content in the staff meeting. Roberts’ video remains on his X profile.

“About ‘no cancelation,’ is there a limiting principle to that? I should have said that there was, especially in light of Tucker hosting not just Fuentes, but a handful of other people,” Roberts said. “You can say you’re not going to participate in canceling someone — a personal friend, an institutional friend — 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 have made that clear.”

At the same time, Roberts also indicated that he had engaged privately with Carlson about objectionable content on his show in the past, including Carlson’s hosting of Holocaust revisionist Daryl Cooper.

Roberts repeatedly alluded to plans in development to clarify the relationship between Heritage and Carlson, and said that a variety of senior Heritage staff will be involved in developing those plans. He said he does not approve of much of Carlson’s recent activity, but generally withheld direct rebuke.

“I made the mistake of conflating too much the personal friendship I have with Tucker — although I want to be really clear, I don’t think that everything, or maybe even most, of what he does now is helpful or good — but conflating that with, particularly the word ‘always,’ as the institution,” Roberts said. “Even the institution can say, ‘Tucker will be a friend,’ but that’s different than saying that you endorse everything your friend does.”

Addressing revelations that Heritage had a paid partnership with Carlson, Roberts noted that the partnership ended this summer, and that Heritage had similar arrangements with various other media figures including Fox News commentator Mark Levin, who has spoken out against Carlson’s antisemitism.

Roberts said that his approach in the video and going forward was and will be driven, in some capacity, by a desire to appeal to and “drive a wedge” between Fuentes and followers of his who might be persuadable or do not share Fuentes’ bigotry.

“Fuentes … has an audience of several million people. At least some of that audience might be open to be converted. My video didn’t do that, although the intention was to open that idea — not to endorse what Fuentes was saying, but quite the opposite, to appeal to them,” Robert said. “There’s a segment of that audience who might be with us, and they really are not Nazis and antisemites, then maybe we can eventually bring them into the fold.”

Roberts offered an apology for the specific terminology he used in describing Carlson’s critics as a “venomous coalition,” saying he did not intend to invoke antisemitic tropes. 

A staffer later pressed him on his description of Carlson’s critics as a “globalist class and their mouthpieces,” which the staffer said also seemed to be an antisemitic trope. Roberts apologized for those comments as well, and said his use of “globalist” was meant differently.

“I misread the situation and the advice that I got,” Roberts said. “I took the advice. I didn’t stop. I own that. [It] was bad, and I should have been better in that moment.”

During a Q&A with Heritage staff, Roberts faced frustration and disappointment from a series of Heritage staffers, some of whom said they had lost confidence in his leadership and argued that both the initial video and his subsequent response and belated apology had been insufficient and wrongheaded. Many said that Heritage needed to make a clear and unequivocal statement disavowing Carlson in order to move forward.

“Only after it became clear that Ryan falling on his sword would be insufficient to quell the outrage, both inside and outside of this building, did we finally see you manage the courage to utter the words, ‘I made a mistake,’” Amy Swearer, a senior legal fellow at Heritage, said. “It took you four days to say that, and even then, the mistake was couched largely in terms of, ‘Well, I’m sorry you guys just didn’t really understand the words that were coming out of my mouth, and maybe I should have spoken better, but also maybe try to listen better.’ With all due respect, Dr. Roberts, we all understood what you said in the video and in the ensuing response.”

Swearer also charged that Roberts has continued to avoid going after Carlson directly.

“We watched you seem perfectly willing to attack all of our friends and allies on the right, but say nothing about the guy who just said he dislikes nothing more than Christian Zionists,” she continued. “We watched this sort of incoherent defense for days of, ‘Well, we can’t participate in cancel culture, and anyone who attacks Tucker is participating in cancel culture, but also we’re going to attack the people who are participating in that cancel culture, and that’s not cancel culture.’”

Several staffers said that the video and the fallout from it had severely damaged Heritage’s reputation and partnerships with other institutions, that serious work would be needed throughout the organization to repair that damage and that Heritage had thus far failed to articulate any such plan or clearly disavow Carlson after nearly a week.

“It has been six days, almost a week, where we as an organization have been unable to utter the words … ‘Tucker’s an antisemite and we as Heritage do not want to associate with him,’” Daniel Flesch, a senior policy analyst at Heritage involved in its Middle East and antisemitism work, said. “We still do not have a statement about that. … We are bleeding trust, reputation, perhaps donors, who knows what else — support.”

“If the Heritage Foundation and you do not dump Tucker Carlson publicly, we are not going to repair that damage,” Hans von Spakovsky, a senior fellow at Heritage, said, adding that it would be unworkable to make a public distinction between Carlson being a personal friend of Roberts versus being a friend of Heritage as an institution.

While the majority of those who raised questions during the meeting were deeply critical of Carlson, a pair of staffers stood out as taking a different stance 

One, describing herself as a member of Gen Z, said that she and many young staffers agreed with Roberts’ video. She also claimed that charges of antisemitism against Carlson were driven by his opposition to foreign intervention.

“Gen Z has an increased unfavorable view of Israel, and it’s not because millions of Americans are antisemitic,” the staffer said. “It’s because we are Catholic and Orthodox and believe that Christian Zionism is a modern heresy. We believe it does go against church doctrine and the teachings of the early church fathers to use Christianity as a defense for a secular nation.”

Roberts responded that Heritage must be “agnostic” on theological questions of Christian Zionism. 

Derek Morgan, Heritage’s executive vice president, added that Heritage’s institutional position is that, “Israel has been a great ally of the United States” and that, “When it’s in the American interest to support the nation of Israel, we will do so.”

Another staffer, Evan Myers, raised particular concern about a request from the Heritage-aligned National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, that young Heritage staffers be offered the opportunity to attend Shabbat dinners as a space for education.

Myers said that doing so would violate his and others’ religious beliefs and that he was concerned that attendance at such events would be used as a “litmus test.” He further suggested that those involved in the task force would leak to the media the names of those who declined to participate.

Victoria Coates, vice president of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at Heritage and a board member of the task force, said she took offense with Myers’ characterization of the request.

“This was a recommendation … That was an open offer from the task force. It was made in generosity of spirit and in the hopes of increased dialogue on this issue,” Coates said. “And Evan, I’m deeply sorry that you could not see that as a generous offer, but rather a personal attack on you. It was not.”

Roberts expressed frustration that communications between himself and members of the antisemitism task force had been shared with the press.

“It’s hard for me and for this institution to consider recommendations when we can’t do that privately,” Roberts said. “I just want to let you know as we move forward on a detailed plan … it’s got to be under the terms that we get to have the conversations privately.”

Less than a day after an antisemitism task force aligned with the Heritage Foundation pledged to stand by the embattled conservative organization, the group’s co-chairs are now demanding concrete reforms from Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts — and warning that they may cut off ties with Heritage if their requests are not met. 

In a Tuesday afternoon email to members of the conservative National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, which was viewed by Jewish Insider, the task force co-chairs shared the text of an email they sent to Roberts earlier in the day. They asked Roberts to remove the controversial video he posted to X last week defending firebrand commentator Tucker Carlson, in which Roberts alleged that Carlson’s critics are part of a “venomous coalition” and that “their attempt to cancel him will fail.” 

“Many of us on the NTFCA are among those who believed you called us part of a ‘venomous coalition’ and implicitly questioned our loyalty to the United States. It makes collaboration with Heritage difficult for our members,” wrote the co-chairs. Roberts’ video came after Carlson faced criticism for hosting neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes on his podcast.

The email to Roberts, which the co-chairs said was drafted in collaboration with other task force members, contained five other “recommendations.” 

They asked for an apology “to those Christians and Jews who are steadfast members of the conservative movement and believe that Israel has a special role to play both biblically and politically,” and for a condemnation of Carlson’s antisemitic content. In Roberts’ video last week, he said “conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government,” even under pressure “from the globalist class.” 

The task force co-chairs also requested that Heritage host a conference about understanding the boundaries of the conservative movement and discussing “how best to keep unity without needing to include the worst among us.” They asked Heritage to hire a visiting fellow “who shares mainstream conservative views on Israel, Jews and Christian Zionists” to win over young people. Lastly, they said they would like to host Shabbat dinners with Heritage’s interns and junior staff members to educate them about Judaism.

The task force’s leaders are Mario Bramnick, a Florida pastor and president of the Latino Coalition for Israel; Victoria Coates, vice president of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at the Heritage Foundation; Ellie Cohanim, who served as deputy antisemitism special envoy in the first Trump administration; and Luke Moon, a pastor and executive director of the Philos Project. 

The task force co-chairs said in the email that if an agreement is not reached soon, their relationship with Heritage “will be irrevocably harmed.” 

“If the terms aren’t met, we will take the NTFCA elsewhere,” Moon told JI on Tuesday. The task force’s members played a major role in the drafting of Project Esther, an antisemitism plan published by the Heritage Foundation last year. 

A spokesperson for the Heritage Foundation did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

Several organizations have already pulled out of the task force to protest Heritage following the release of Roberts’ video last week, including the Zionist Organization of America, Young Jewish Conservatives, the Coalition for Jewish Values and Combat Antisemitism Movement. 

In a Monday night speech, Roberts said Heritage “will never, ever, ever stop fighting against antisemitism in all its forms.” He offered an apology to his “Jewish friends” without addressing the controversy over Carlson directly.

When Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts responded to the latest controversy roiling the Republican Party — podcaster Tucker Carlson’s friendly interview with white nationalist Nick Fuentes — it was a touch ironic that Roberts’ chosen venue to defend Carlson was on the social media platform X, where Roberts posted a video on Thursday calling Carlson a “close friend.”

That’s because X is the only mainstream social media site where Fuentes is still allowed to have an account, after being banned on Meta’s platforms and on YouTube for a long history of hateful rhetoric targeting Jews, women, Black people and many other minority groups. The far-right conspiracy theorist was once banned from X, too, but owner Elon Musk allowed Fuentes back onto the platform last year. 

“He will be reinstated, provided he does not violate the law, and let him be crushed by the comments and Community Notes,” Musk posted on X in May 2024. “It is better to have anti whatever out in the open to be rebutted than grow simmering in the darkness.”

Now, Fuentes has more than a million followers on the platform and a wider reach than ever before. His interview with Carlson, where he said a “big challenge” to unifying the country is “organized Jewry,” has more than 17 million views on X and 5 million views on YouTube. 

Their interview — and the fact that Heritage, one of the most venerable conservative institutions in the country, is defending Carlson — has sparked a reckoning in the Republican Party about a growing strain of antisemitism on the right. It has also reignited a debate about “cancel culture” and social media, and whether platforms like X have a responsibility to police the content that appears there.

Many conservatives, even those who have sharply condemned Carlson for hosting Fuentes, believe banning people because of their beliefs, no matter how hateful, is wrong. 

“I believe that Nick Fuentes is odious and despicable, but I’ve never called for his cancellation, and in fact, I’ve called for his restoration to those services, despite the fact that I think he’s odious and despicable,” Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro said on Monday in a podcast. “The issue here isn’t that Tucker Carlson had Nick Fuentes on his show last week. He has every right to do that, of course. The issue here is that Tucker Carlson decided to normalize and fluff Nick Fuentes, and that the Heritage Foundation then decided to robustly defend that performance.”

(Roberts pledged to stand against antisemitism and offered an apology to his “Jewish friends” in a Monday night speech.)

Tal Fortgang, a legal policy fellow at the Manhattan Institute think tank, argued that banning Fuentes in the first place gave him the oxygen he craved — which increased exponentially when Musk then publicly allowed him to return to the platform after reversing the content moderation policies of X’s prior management, when he purchased the company in 2022.

“These underground counter-cultural movements thrive on being policed. They see that internally as a sign that they’re winning,” Fortgang told Jewish Insider. “What does empower people like Fuentes is saying, ‘Only certain people are going to be allowed to post on X. We’re going to have ill-defined content moderation policies, and we thought he was forbidden, but turns out, he’s permitted.’ That sends a message that he is within the window of acceptable discourse.” 

Fuentes is still banned on other social media sites, even as other popular platforms like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube have rolled back some of their own content moderation policies this year. 

“They’re doing less than they used to do, but they’re still doing more than X,” Yfat Barak-Cheney, director of international affairs and director of technology and human rights at the World Jewish Congress, said of the other major social media platforms. X is “absolutely” the mainstream social media site where antisemitism is most visible and most tolerated, she said. A September report from the Jewish Council for Public Affairs found that antisemitism is “thriving in plain sight” on X. 

“Research has definitely shown that since the takeover [by Musk], between a change in the consequences or the sanctions on hateful speech, the reduction of the size of the teams working on this and the general atmosphere on the platform, we’ve definitely seen a lot more right-wing extremism and antisemitism, and also from the left,” Barak-Cheny told JI. “It’s just a platform that’s easier to work on without being sanctioned.” 

X’s policies still prohibit abuse and hateful content, particularly when targeting users directly. But enforcement of those policies is at best inconsistent and at worst near-nonexistent. (A spokesperson for X did not respond to a request for comment.)

“We are concerned about the spread of antisemitism and extremism, on social media platforms, including X, where antisemites and extremists are operating largely unchecked,” a spokesperson for the Anti-Defamation League said. “We continue to urge these platforms to invest in their trust and safety teams and engage in meaningful content moderation to ensure Jewish and all users are safe.”

Some Fuentes critics tried to walk a fine line between expressing concern about his reinstatement and reiterating their opposition to censorship.

“Musk went too far in opening up his venue,” said David Bernstein, founder of the North American Values Institute, which fights left-wing antisemitism. “Those who have tried to regulate speech have gone too far in the opposite direction.”

Karen Paikin Barall, chief policy officer at the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, a nonprofit legal center, suggested that allowing Fuentes back on X may have been a mistake, though she did not call for his removal.

“Free speech must never be hindered. It’s one of the core principles on which our nation was founded. But platforms like Discord, Steam, Twitch, Reddit, Meta, X and TikTok need to enforce their own rules consistently, without double standards when it comes to Jews,” Barall told JI, before adding: “Allowing someone like Nick Fuentes back on a major platform raises real concerns about consistency and accountability.”

If Fuentes were once again removed from X, it might give those who oppose his hate-filled ideology some relief. But one Jewish official at a different technology company, who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to press, cautioned that it is Fuentes’ interlocutor Carlson — who has given a platform to prominent right-wing antisemites over the past year — who offers a warning for what happens when institutional guardrails are removed.

“Everyone who thought Tucker was a problem when he was at Fox and saw him trending in this direction saw some comfort in the fact that he was going to be off Fox News. And what did that do? It liberated him,” said the tech company staffer. “It didn’t, like, de-platform him. There’s no such thing as de-platforming anymore. You can’t do it, not really. They’ll find a way.”

American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Danielle Pletka wrote in a blog post on Monday that “silence is complicity” as she called for fellow conservatives to call out Roberts’ actions at Heritage, and to condemn Carlson and Fuentes. But she told JI that the answer is not kicking Fuentes off X again.

“Censorship is not the right tool. It really isn’t. And censorship doesn’t make bad people go away. To the contrary, it makes them go underground,” Pletka said. “I’d rather know who these people are.”

The leaders of an antisemitism task force closely affiliated with the Heritage Foundation said on Monday that they would stand by the conservative institution for now as its president faces backlash for defending Tucker Carlson, following the conservative podcaster’s controversial interview with neo-Nazi influencer Nick Fuentes.

The co-chairs of the National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, a right-wing group that played a key role in drafting Heritage’s Project Esther antisemitism plan last year, said in a Monday night email to task force members that they had spoken with Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts earlier in the day. 

“He shared his apology about how he has handled this issue, and was very open to our counsel,” the task force co-chairs wrote in the email, which was obtained by Jewish Insider. “Because of this we are asking the members of the taskforce to give us additional time to work out the practical steps moving forward.”

The four co-chairs are Mario Bramnick, a Florida pastor and president of the Latino Coalition for Israel; Victoria Coates, vice president of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at the Heritage Foundation; Ellie Cohanim, who served as deputy antisemitism special envoy in the first Trump administration; and Luke Moon, a pastor and executive director of the Philos Project. 

In the email, Bramnick, Coates, Cohanim and Moon, all staunch supporters of President Donald Trump, said the “conservative movement” is at an “inflection point.”

“We can allow the movement to elevate the most base identitarian elements within the movement or we can choose to build on the wins of the last year under President Donald Trump’s leadership,” they wrote. “When we started the National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism the challenges before us were from the pro-Hamas radical Left. More recently, forces have begun to come together to aggressively push antisemitism on the Right. Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes are the most notable, but not the only voices we need to contend.”

The four co-chairs urged their task force members to “stick with us.” They said they will “work closely” with Roberts and the Heritage leadership “over the next several days.” 

Roberts has faced significant backlash for defending Carlson and his choice to host Fuentes, including from some Republican senators. Amid the criticism, he has made clear his disavowal of Fuentes’ racist and antisemitic beliefs while standing by Carlson. 

In a Monday night speech at Hillsdale College in Michigan, Roberts took a sharp line against antisemitism and offered an apology to his “Jewish friends.”  

“Let me say loud and clear: The Heritage Foundation, which has always not only stood against antisemitism — and I, if you know anything about my career, have done the same — we will never, ever, ever stop fighting against antisemitism in all its forms,” he said. 

At least two organizations resigned from the antisemitism task force earlier Monday: Young Jewish Conservatives and the Zionist Organization of America. 

“While we understand that many pro-Israel, pro-America conservatives remain at the Heritage Foundation, the buck stops with Dr. Roberts. As long as he remains at the helm and Heritage continues its alliance with a vocal purveyor of antisemitism in the United States, Young Jewish Conservative[s] has no choice but to withdraw its membership in the National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism,” Young Jewish Conservatives announced in a statement.

ZOA National President Morton Klein said the organization would quit its involvement with Project Esther “unless Heritage President Kevin Roberts publicly and immediately condemns Carlson’s actions and statements, apologizes for Roberts’ video statements and ends Roberts’ and Heritage’s relationship with Tucker Carlson.”

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) criticized Republicans who refuse to disavow prominent antisemites in the conservative movement as “cowards” after the Heritage Foundation and its president, Kevin Roberts, defended Tucker Carlson and his friendly interview with neo-Nazi influencer Nick Fuentes. 

Cruz warned during a half hour address at the opening of the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual summit in Las Vegas on Thursday evening that young Christians were turning away from supporting Israel, something he argued was the result of pro-Israel Christians being maligned by leading voices in the America First movement. 

The Texas Republican senator 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.

Fuentes has praised Hitler on multiple occasions; in his statement, Roberts said he “disagree[s] with” some of Fuentes’ views, “but canceling him is not the answer.” 

“The last year, we’ve seen three prominent people on the right publicly muse, ‘Gosh, maybe Hitler’s not all that bad.’ No. He is the embodiment of evil, a grotesque bigot. And if you’re confused by that, you’re an imbecile,” Cruz said on Thursday. “Too many people are scared to confront them. I want to ask you, how many elected Republicans do you see standing up and calling this out? How many do you see willing to take on the voices in the anti-Israel right?”

“More than a few of my Republican officeholders are terrified of upsetting people with really big megaphones,” he explained.

Cruz warned that antisemitic ideas are spreading among young Americans through social media and argued that rising support for isolationism and the pro-Israel community’s failure to adequately explain the benefits of the U.S.-Israel relationship accounted for the broad ideological shifts on the issue — but he noted that there “is also a theological argument” being made on the Christian right against Jews. 

“We are seeing young Christians and young evangelicals turning against Israel, and they are being pitched lies,” Cruz said. “One particular lie is something called replacement theology, and replacement theology is a twisted view that the Jews are no longer God’s chosen people, that the promises in the Old Testament no longer apply and that Christians have replaced Jews. Now in my Bible, I believe every word of it is true, and I believe every promise that God made to the people of Israel remains a promise that is made to the chosen people.”

After noting that he was “proud to be a Christian Zionist,” Cruz noted Carlson’s recent comments expressing his disdain for people who identify as such while appearing to note his protected status in the Trump administration. Carlson attacked Cruz and other pro-Israel conservatives, including U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, by name in his podcast conversation with Fuentes, where Carlson claimed that those who identify as Christian Zionists have been infected by a “brain virus.”

“There are some people who are embraced at the highest level of government who said there is no one they hate more than Christian Zionists,” Cruz said. “Well, I’ll tell you what, there’s no one I hate more than communists and jihadists who want to murder us. Now is the time for choosing. Now is the time for courage.”

“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,” he added.

Omri Ceren, Cruz’s legislative director and longtime advisor, criticized Heritage directly in a post on X on Friday morning, writing that: “I mean, if Republican Jews don’t have a place at @Heritage that’s a choice its current leadership is institutionally empowered to make, but it sits uncomfortably with the organization’s history.”

Cruz’s comments were met with praise from Deborah Lipstadt, the State Department’s special antisemitism envoy during the Biden administration, who posted a message on X commending the Texas Republican.

Conservatives, including the CEO of the Republican Jewish Coalition, condemned the Heritage Foundation and its president, Kevin Roberts, for Roberts’ defense of his “close friend” Tucker Carlson amid criticism of Carlson’s friendly interview with neo-Nazi influencer Nick Fuentes and his general antisemitic and anti-Israel turn.

Roberts also declined to fully disavow Fuentes, saying that “canceling him is not the answer.”

“Watching the statements from Kevin Roberts today, as somebody who has been involved and supportive of the Heritage Foundation since I came to Washington in 1987, I am appalled, offended and disgusted that he and Heritage would stand with Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes as somehow being acceptable spokespeople within the conservative movement,” Matt Brooks, the RJC CEO, told Jewish Insider.

Brooks said that Heritage’s defense of Carlson and Fuentes “is a total abrogation of their mission and what it means to be a conservative today.” 

He said that RJC has worked with Heritage in various ways over the years, particularly its foreign policy team, “but obviously there’s going to be a reassessment of our relationship with Heritage in light of this.”

Brooks said that “we’ve seen Heritage moving further in this direction,” but that he believes that it is still “well outside of the mainstream of where the conservative movement in the Republican Party is.”

“They’re becoming more like Tucker Carlson and less like Ronald Reagan. Tucker Carlson represents the Barack Obama-Bernie Sanders wing of the Republican Party,” Brooks said. “I believe that there’s still a vibrant Trump-Reagan wing of the Republican Party, and Heritage continues to position itself away from that — I think to their detriment.”

Richard Goldberg, a former Trump administration official, told JI that his “heart goes out” to Heritage staff who have “worked for years tirelessly in defense of both the United States and Israel, and in the defense of both Christians and Jews, and … certainly deserve better than this.”

Their work, he continued, “is fundamentally disconnected from the video that Kevin put out,” which is “really vile” and “filled with canards and straw men in order to try to bait opponents into some sort of imagined conflict that does not exist — I think to create such conflict.”

Goldberg said that unless Roberts plans to conduct mass firings at Heritage of those working on national security and foreign policy issues and the group’s Project Esther antisemitism program to bring the organization in line with the isolationist Quincy Institute, “there is a great deal of disconnect between what he is saying and doing and what his organization is saying and doing.”

The enemies of both America and Israel, “would like nothing more than to see this kind of messaging succeed. This is very much in line with a Marxist-Islamist ideology that really only benefits China, Russia, terrorists and their sponsors,” Goldberg argued.

“I hope we don’t allow this strain to try to break what is core to American values and core to American interests, and that’s Christians and Jews sticking together, and America and Israel sticking together,” Goldberg said.

Joel Griffith, a co-chair of Young Jewish Conservatives and a former research fellow at Heritage, called for Heritage members and donors to speak out against Roberts. Griffth is currently a senior fellow at Advancing American Freedom, the think tank founded by former Vice President Mike Pence.

“As a former Heritage fellow who’s both patriotically American and proudly Jewish, I’m deeply disheartened by Kevin Roberts continued support for Tucker Carlson even as he ridicules allied Christians who believe in the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in their homeland, slanders Israel as genocidal, supports removal of citizenship for young Americans who serve in the IDF, and platforms a Holocaust denier,” Griffith told JI. “I’m hopeful that Heritage members and donors will make their voices heard. Kevin Roberts does not speak for me as a Heritage alum, nor does he represent the views of many allies of Israel who remain on staff at Heritage.”

In his video, Roberts cited comments by Vice President JD Vance at a Turning Point USA event on Wednesday that no other country should come “before the interest of American citizens.” Vance’s comments had come in response to an openly antisemitic question accusing Jews of persecuting Christians, a notion Vance did not directly dispute.

“I wish that Vice President Vance had answered the question differently,” Brooks told JI. “He should know — and if he doesn’t, I am sure there are a number of people who will make the information available to him — that the Israelis have not limited access to any of the Christian holy sites or persecuted Christians in Israel. In fact, things couldn’t be further from the truth.”

“It has been Israelis, since the founding of the State of Israel and even before, that have protected the Christian heritage sites, and have always talked about having Israel as the home to the three major religions and having freedom of access and freedom of religion throughout the country,” Brooks continued.

Goldberg said that Vance’s recent visit to Israel and his trips to Christian holy sites in Jerusalem were “outstanding” and “important for Christians … around the world.” 

He urged Vance “not to be afraid to be very direct in shutting down Jew hate and antisemitic tropes when the appear when he is out on the stump or campaigning” — noting that TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk had a record of responding forcefully to antisemitism at his own public events. “I think it would honor Charlie to emulate that style as well.”

Noah Pollak, who is serving in the Trump administration as a senior advisor to the Department of Education, said on X, “I’m genuinely curious what Roberts and people promoting this line of innuendo think they are responding to. Did someone ask you not to be loyal to your faith and country? Who? Can you post a screenshot or something?”

Far-right influencer Laura Loomer, a close ally of President Donald Trump, claimed Roberts’ statement was part of a coordinated “psyop” to “kneecap Trump” before the 2026 midterms.

Rabbi Yaakov Menken, the executive vice president of the Coalition for Jewish Values — one of the few Jewish groups that had partnered with Heritage on combating antisemitism — said that “Heritage has chosen to vocally stand with an antisemite, call his Jewish critics a ‘[venomous] coalition,’ and slander organizations like CJV as if we were slandering Carlson rather than standing up for his victims. The consequences will be far-reaching indeed.”

Strategist and commentator David Reaboi said that it should be “obvious” to anyone who has watched Carlson’s show that his commentary on Israel and other issues goes beyond criticism to “grotesque lies and bad faith distortions” and likewise questioned what “globalists” are “preventing discussion about Israel, or (as you claim) attempting to bully others into supporting it.”

“Are we allowed to take Carlson’s ‘criticisms’ of Israel and its supporters seriously — I mean, as issues of fact to be debated or debunked?” Reaboi continued. “If so, I haven’t seen any evidence for it. All his lies and slander just go into the category of ‘his truth,’ like the leftists with whom he agrees on every foreign policy question.”

Jason Brodsky, the policy director of United Against Nuclear Iran, praised the work that Heritage has done on Iran, Israel and antisemitism, but said that “this video is disappointing and lacks moral clarity” given that Carlson is “obsessed with Jews and traffics in antisemitism.”

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts doubled down on the influential conservative group’s support for Tucker Carlson, who has been leaning into increasingly explicit antisemitism and opposition to Israel on his podcast, and expressed unwillingness to “cancel” neo-Nazi influencer Nick Fuentes.

Roberts’ comments come after a friendly Carlson interview with Fuentes, in which Carlson described Christian Zionists as infected by a “brain virus.” Carlson said he dislikes Christian Zionists “more than anybody. Because it’s Christian heresy, and I’m offended by that as a Christian,” pointing to conservatives including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who has repeatedly sparred with Carlson over Israel and antisemitism, and Ambassador Mike Huckabee. On Wednesday, reports arose that Heritage had scrubbed references to Carlson from one of its donation pages.

Roberts, in a video posted on X on Thursday amid online discussion of Heritage’s relationship with Carlson, said he refused to cancel Carlson or Fuentes and that the group would “always” defend Carlson from the “pressure” of the “globalist class.”

“When it serves the interest of 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,” Roberts said. “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.”

He said the group would “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.”

Roberts rejected those criticizing Carlson as a “venomous coalition” and said that “their attempt to cancel him will fail.” 

He added that it is the responsibility of Heritage to attack the left, not to criticize those on the right. “I disagree with and even abhor things that Nick Fuentes says, but canceling him is not the answer either,” Roberts continued.

Roberts, whose group assembled the Project Esther plan to combat antisemitism — focused on anti-Israel left-wing groups — also said in the video, “I want to be clear about one thing, Christians can critique the State of Israel without being antisemitic. And of course antisemitism should be condemned.”

Roberts quoted a statement by Vice President JD Vance at a Turning Point USA event on Wednesday: “What I am not OK with is any country coming before the interest of American citizens. And it is important for all of us, assuming we are American citizens, to put the interest of our own country first. That’s where our allegiance lies, and that’s where it will stay.”

Roberts’ comments come amid an uproar from pro-Israel conservatives about Vance’s response to an antisemitic question he faced from a member of the audience at that event.

The questioner declared that Judaism does “not agree with [our religion] but also openly supports the [persecution] of ours,” to enthusiastic applause from the crowd.

Vance said in his response, “When people say that Israel is somehow manipulating or controlling the president of the United States — they’re not controlling this president of the United States, which is one of the reasons why we’ve been able to have some of the success that we’ve had in the Middle East.”

He said that the Gaza peace deal was only possible because President Donald Trump was “actually… willing to apply leverage to the State of Israel.”

The vice president also said that ensuring Christian access to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem is an “obvious area of common interest” and that he is “fine” with working with Israel on the issue. “What I am not OK with is any country coming before the interests of American citizens,” he continued.

Vance did not address or condemn the questioner’s accusations that Jews are attempting to persecute Christians.

Fuentes has been celebrating the recent developments, posting on X, “The Groypers have taken over. We run this” in response to questions posed to Vance at the TPUSA event.

Responding to Roberts, Fuentes said, “I don’t know what exactly you ‘abhor’ about my views, but we can all agree that free speech, Christ, and America First should be the pillars of our movement. Thank you for your courage in standing up for open discourse and defending Tucker against the Israel First Woke Right.”