Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Friday criticized Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts after he defended Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with white nationalist Nick Fuentes.
Fuentes has denied the Holocaust on multiple occasions and made several antisemitic remarks during his discussion with Carlson.
Roberts said Friday the Heritage Foundation was not distancing itself from the former Fox News host amid concerns about the content in the interview and told followers that “Christians can critique the state of Israel without being antisemitic.”
“And of course, antisemitism should be condemned,” he added in the post shared online.
Cruz said the Heritage Foundation and other supporters of Carlson’s interview are misaligned.
“Now is a time for choosing. If you sit there with someone who says Adolf Hitler was very cool and that their mission is to defeat ‘global Jewry,’ and you say nothing, then you are a coward, and you are complicit in that evil,” the Texas Republican said during Friday remarks at the Republican Jewish Coalition Annual Summit in Las Vegas.
McConnell echoed the criticism.
“The ‘intellectual backbone of the conservative movement’ is only as strong as the values it defends,” McConnell wrote in a statement on social platform X.
“Last I checked, conservatives should feel no obligation’ to carry water for antisemites and apologists for America-hating autocrats,” he continued. “But maybe I just don’t know what time it is.”
Cruz’s and McConnell’s comments represent that of a broader spectrum of condemnation from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), the highest-ranking Jewish member of Congress, said Roberts’s statements were “deeply disturbing, an embrace of antisemitism and white supremacist conspiracy theories, all while trafficking antisemitic conspiracy theories of ‘globalist’ powers that control US policy,” according to The Associated Press.
He called on those connected to the Heritage Foundation to refute the “mainstreaming of these hateful ideologies.”
Roberts’s comments follow a series of antisemitic incidents tied to the GOP in recent months, including Nazi ideology being spread in a group chat with Young Republicans and a swastika discovered inside the office of a lawmaker.
Matt Brooks, CEO of the Republican Jewish Coalition, also denounced Roberts’s position Thursday in remarks to Jewish Insider.
In a statement to the outlet, Brooks said he was “appalled, offended and disgusted that he [Kevin Roberts] and Heritage would stand with Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes as somehow being acceptable spokespeople within the conservative movement.”
