Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, issued a statement denouncing Nick Fuentes, a racist antisemite, on Friday, the day after Roberts had backed former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and said Carlson would always be a “close friend” of the conservative think tank. Carlson hosted Fuentes on his podcast and was criticized widely for failing to denounce his guest’s Jew-hatred.

“The Heritage Foundation and I denounce and stand against his vicious antisemitic ideology, his Holocaust denial and his relentless conspiracy theories that echo the darkest chapters of history,” Roberts said, of Fuentes. “We are disgusted by his musings about rape, women, child marriage and abusing his potential wife.”

“Fuentes made grotesque analogies to try to cast doubt on the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust and has said, ‘I think the Holocaust is exaggerated. I don’t hate Hitler,’” Roberts said. “Fuentes called for the death penalty for ‘perfidious Jews’ and other non-Christians, stating that ‘when we take power, they need to be given the death penalty.’”

“Racism and antisemitism are not relics of the past. They have blossomed on the left on university campuses and grown on the right through figures like Fuentes,” the Heritage president added. “Nick Fuentes’s antisemitism is not complicated, ironic or misunderstood. It is explicit, dangerous and demands our unified opposition as conservatives.”

Roberts’s post on Friday mentioned Carlson only once, noting that Fuentes appeared on the latter’s program.

In the hours after Roberts’s first post on Thursday, in which critics said that he evoked the language of anti-Israel conspiracies, some Heritage staffers, including Jews, decried Carlson and Fuentes. Others shared social media posts to that effect without responding to Roberts in their own words.

“Fuentes claims to be a man of God and yet, rejects the laws of God. He clearly doesn’t believe in the inherent worth of all human life or the imago Dei,” imitating the divine, wrote Richard Stern, acting director of Heritage’s economic policy studies institute and director of the think tank’s center for the federal budget.

“Don’t be deceived by those wearing religion as a skin suit,” Stern wrote.

Preston Bashers, a tax policy research fellow at Heritage, wrote that “there are some who just don’t know what Fuentes is all about, including people who watched Tucker’s two -hour pattycake session with him.”

“The problem isn’t so much that Tucker did the interview but how he did it,” Bashers said.

Jason Bedrick, an education policy research fellow at Heritage and an Orthodox Jew, stated that “Tucker pushes decidedly non-conservative ideas and figures while sowing division on the right.”

“Tucker has made clear that he is not a part of the conservative coalition. Indeed, he has made clear that he hates large portions of the conservative coalition,” Bedrick wrote. “Conservatives should be clear-eyed about who are and are not our friends.”

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