Heritage Foundation Staff Revolt Over Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes

Instead, Roberts released a video on X Thursday in support of Carlson and Fuentes, calling the former “a close friend of the Heritage Foundation” and saying that “canceling” Fuentes is not the solution, even though he personally abhors what he says. In response, Heritage staff members—including Heritage research fellow Preston Brashers and Richard Stern, the director of Heritage’s economic policy institute and federal budget center—have started criticizing Roberts on social media.

At least a handful of Heritage staffers, including Jason Bedrick, Jay Greene, and John Peluso, also retweeted Brashers’s post. Other conservatives, including Senator Ted Cruz and influencer Bethany Mandel, have also criticized Roberts. The backlash led to Roberts making a follow-up post on Friday condemning Fuentes’s views but reiterating his view “that the best way to fight antisemitic ideas was to challenge them head on.”  

“Our task is to confront and challenge those poisonous ideas at every turn to prevent them from taking America to a very dark place. Join us—not to cancel—but to guide, challenge, and strengthen the conversation, and be confident as I am that our best ideas at the heart of western civilization will prevail,” Roberts’s post read.