Amid the fallout from the Heritage Foundation’s embrace of Tucker Carlson after his controversial interview with neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, Daniel Flesch — a senior policy analyst at the conservative think tank — has emerged as a critical voice raising the alarm on right-wing antisemitism from within the institution. 

On Monday, at a Hanukkah party steps from the White House, Flesch, who is Jewish, received the Young Maccabee Award from Young Jewish Conservatives, a political group founded in 2011 as a political home for Jewish conservatives in Washington. In a brief speech, Flesch warned of the dangers of growing antisemitism on the American right, and urged fellow conservatives to do more to take a stand against it. Otherwise, Flesch said gravely, the survival of America is at stake. 

“The last couple of years, really for longer than that, the threat of antisemitism has largely been the domain of the left,” Flesch said. “Now, in some ways, the call is coming from inside the house.”

Flesch led the drafting of Heritage’s Project Esther report, a plan released in 2024 outlining ways to counter pro-Hamas antisemitism on the left. He also served as Heritage’s point person for the National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, a coalition of conservative groups that were involved in writing the Project Esther report. 

After Heritage President Kevin Roberts posted a video defending Carlson and his choice to host Fuentes, the task force disaffiliated from Heritage. Flesch remains both a Heritage staff member and a task force member, but he warned at a staff meeting days after the video was released, “We are bleeding trust, reputation, perhaps donors.” 

“Right now, the issue we’re facing is a threat to the West. We see it on the left. Now we’re seeing it to the right. And those like Tucker Carlson and others present the greatest threat, I think, on the right,” Flesch said on Monday. “They are anti-conservatives in the conservative movement, seeking to destroy our movements, and in so doing, destroy the future of the United States.” 

Roberts has apologized for the video, in which he called Carlson a “close friend” and said he would not give in to calls to “cancel” Fuentes. But he has not distanced himself from Carlson. 

“Israel will be fine. The question is, will we be fine here?” said Flesch. “If you have the left captured, you’ll have the right captured. What is there? Jews, obviously, we’re always left in the middle, we’ve got the State of Israel. Thank God, Israel will be strong. But this is a moment to say hineni [“here I am”] for each and every one of us.”

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) warned on Monday against the mainstreaming of antisemitic figures within the conservative movement in response to Tucker Carlson’s platforming of neo-Nazi influencer Nick Fuentes.

Hawley, an ally of the national conservative movement who has advocated for the Trump administration to take an aggressive approach to combating campus antisemitism, made the comments while speaking to Jewish Insider about the controversy surrounding Fuentes’ appearance on Carlson’s podcast late last week. 

“I just think on the substance of what he says, I mean, it’s antisemitic. Let’s just call it for what it is, let’s not sugarcoat it,” Hawley said of Fuentes. 

“That’s not who we are as Republicans, as conservatives. Listen, this is America. He can have whatever views he wants. But the question for us as conservatives is: Are those views going to define who we are? And I think we need to say, ‘No, they’re not. No. Just no, no, no,’” he continued. “We need to be really clear, and I say that not only as a conservative, but also as a Christian. There is no place for antisemitic hatred, tropes, any of that stuff. I just think we’ve gotta say that stuff.”

The Missouri senator drew a parallel between the antisemitism seen at universities across the country since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel and Fuentes’ views. 

“Do we really want to be part of what we’ve seen happen on college campuses, for instance, in this country in the last two or three years? Conservatives have been decrying that,” Hawley said. “Are we now to believe that, oh, actually, we have no problem with that? And that all of the things they were saying about Jews and Jewish Americans, that was fine? That’s not my view. I wasn’t fine with it then, I’m not fine with it now.”

“I thought it was morally repulsive then, I think it’s morally repulsive now. I’m not going to change my opinion on that. I want to be really clear: that’s above all a moral issue,” he added. 

Hawley was not the only Republican senator to voice their objections to a GOP embrace of Fuentes or the avowed antisemite’s appearance on Carlson’s program.

The fallout now involves the Heritage Foundation, the result of its president, Kevin Roberts, coming to Carlson’s defense in a video last Thursday that called out the “venomous coalition attacking” Carlson and warned that “their attempt to cancel him will fail.” Roberts has since clarified that he and Heritage do not support Fuentes’ antisemitic views, though he refused to disavow him, and is facing growing calls to walk back his comments. 

Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), the co-chair of the Senate antisemitism task force, told JI that he was “a little surprised that Heritage jumped out in support of [Carlson] and Nick Fuentes to say, ‘Hey, we want them in our camp’ after the statements that were made.”

“Heritage could have just sat back and not said anything, but instead, they chose to jump out on their side,” Lankford continued. “I don’t get that.”

He, like Hawley and other Republican lawmakers, warned that the right faces a similar crisis of antisemitism as is roiling the left if conservatives do not proactively confront and shun antisemites in their midst.

“The left has seen an implosion of their party based on antisemitism rising in their party. I don’t want to see the same thing on the right,” Lankford said. “To say the least, I want to make it very, very clear we are not the party of antisemitism. We’re not the party that believes Hitler was a good guy and that Winston Churchill was the bad guy. We’re not the party that blames media issues on the Jews and all these weird tropes that are out there. That’s not who we are, that’s not what we stand for, nor what we should stand for.”

He said that he does not understand the impulse to “allow it to be a big tent and allow antisemitism in our party. If there are [antisemites] that are there, we should call it out and say that’s wrong.”

“What I’ve tried to be very clear on is [that] the ‘New Right’ is now quoting an old wrong. It’s wrong,” Lankford continued.

Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) offered a similar message.

“The Democrat Party — we already have a party that’s for antisemitism [and] is against Israel,” Scott told JI. “The Republican Party [is going to] stand for Israel and we’re going to stand against antisemitism. I don’t think there’s any question.”

Rabbi Yaakov Menken, the executive vice president of the Coalition for Jewish Values, told JI that Roberts’ message “was the most tone-deaf comment, in both its content and its timing, that I’ve ever heard from a major Washington organization on any political side.” 

Menken resigned from Heritage’s Project Esther, the group’s antisemitism initiative, last week in response to Roberts’ video message defending Carlson. Along with Menken and CJV, several other groups have also publicly disaffiliated from Heritage’s antisemitism task force, including the National Jewish Advocacy Center, the Zionist Organization of America and Young Jewish Conservatives.