‘Conservatives Should Feel No Obligation to Carry Water for Antisemites’
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Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) criticized Heritage Foundation for its defense tucker carlson “Conservatives should not feel obliged to water down anti-Semites,” he wrote on Friday.
On Thursday, the president of the Heritage Foundation said, Kevin RobertsReleased a highly controversial video in which he defends Carlson’s recent interview with white nationalists Nick Fuentes — despite calls for the organization to distance itself from the former Fox News host.
“We will always defend the truth, we will always defend America, and we will always defend our friends against slander by bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda. That includes Tucker Carlson,” Roberts said. “I don’t agree with what Nick Fuentes said, and I even hate it, but canceling him isn’t the answer either.”
“The ‘intellectual backbone of the conservative movement’ is only as strong as the values it espouses,” McConnell wrote. “Last I checked, ‘conservatives shouldn’t feel obligated to carry water for anti-Semites and apologists for America-hating autocrats,'” he said.
Also at the Republican Jewish Coalition leadership summit on Thursday, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) rejected Carlson-Fuentes interview says it was “cowardly and complicit” to offer a stage to someone who praised Hitler. He warned: “If you sit there with someone who says Adolf Hitler It was very, very cool and you don’t say anything, then you’re a coward and an accomplice.”
The backlash wasn’t limited to Capitol Hill. Inside Heritage, several staff members publicly rebuked their boss’s stance, subtweeting Roberts with harsh condemnations and emphasizing that defending Fuentes crossed a moral and strategic line for the conservative think tank. Their criticisms echoed a growing chorus on the right, as leading conservative voices warned that legitimizing Fuentes’ rhetoric risked dragging the movement into openly extremist territory.
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