Heritage Boss Apologizes for Defending Tucker Carlson

"I made a mistake and I let you down and I let down this institution. Period. Full Stop," Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts told the staff of the conservative think tank on Wednesday, a week after he posted a video decrying a "venomous" coalition attacking the right-wing podcast host Tucker Carlson—and declaring the Heritage Foundation would always defend him against "the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda."

Roberts said he was willing to resign but felt a "moral obligation" to repair the situation and had told the organization’s board of directors: "I made the mess, let me clean it up."

The Washington Free Beacon obtained and reviewed a video of the meeting. "If we see someone leaking, you’re fired," Eric Korsvall, the organization’s chief operating officer, said during the question and answer portion of the meeting.

While Roberts stated unequivocally in his original video that the Heritage Foundation would never cancel "our friends," he said Wednesday he should have made clear there was a "limiting principle."

"You can say you’re not going to participate in canceling someone … 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’ve made that clear."

He added that he wasn’t actually very familiar with the white nationalist, Stalin fan, and J.D. Vance critic Nick Fuentes, with whom Carlson conducted a friendly interview last week on his podcast, though Roberts has spoken several times in recent days about the size of Fuentes’s audience and argued that "canceling" him, given his listenership, which Roberts pegged at 5 million people, will simply make him more popular.

"I didn’t know much about this Fuentes guy," he said. "I still don’t."

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

Roberts used his remarks to explain how the video came to be posted. "This is an explanation, not an excuse," he said, telling staffers that the think tank was under pressure to "make a statement" that Carlson was "no longer part of the conservative movement."

Roberts said his former chief of staff, Ryan Neuhaus, who has since resigned, wrote the script for the video and deceived him into believing colleagues had approved the message. "Our former chief of staff had the pen," he said. "When the script was presented to me … I understood from our former colleague that it was approved, it was signed off on by the handful of colleagues who are part of that. Still my fault, I should have had the wisdom to say, ‘Time out, let’s double check this.’"

He went on to apologize for the use of the term "venomous coalition," describing it as a "terrible choice of words, especially for our Jewish colleagues and friends," adding that his friend, the Israeli-American scholar Yoram Hazony, the author of The Virtue of Nationalism, traveled to Washington, D.C., to help him stem the self-inflicted crisis.

Roberts took questions from the audience, including from Robert Rector, a welfare scholar, who described himself as a 47-year veteran of the Heritage Foundation—"longer than most of you have been alive," he said.

He harkened back to William F. Buckley Jr., the National Review founder. "I hope you know who he is," Rector said. "The boundaries that he set forth, William Buckley, in the early 1960s, were twofold. You have to expunge all anti-Semitism, all of it. But that’s just part of it … the other is you have to expel the lunatics. Ok? The lunatics who think that Eisenhower is a communist. And we have them back now. Ok? They are both here, back, just the way they were in 1959. And we have to go back and set the general parameters. You say, ‘Oh, we don’t cancel.’ We do cancel. Did we cancel David Duke? Yes. Did we cancel the John Birch Society? Yes, ok. Because they were harmful. Because if they’re in your movement you look like clowns. The issue here is Tucker Carlson … Tucker’s show is like stepping into a lunatic asylum."