Heritage Foundation Wants Jew-Hater Nick Fuentes in Its Big Tent

The Heritage Foundation gave efforts to bring the hatred of Jews into the mainstream among patriots a massive boost on Thursday, when its president, Kevin Roberts, published a video declaring the Foundation’s stout and wholehearted support for Tucker Carlson, who has done more than anyone (with the possible exception of Candace Owens) to make Americans believe that hating Jews and wishing the worst possible fates upon them is just good old-fashioned America-First patriotism.

Carlson did this most recently by having a friendly chat on his wildly popular podcast with the notorious provocateur Nick Fuentes, who is one of the principal drivers of the new antisemitism. Fuentes also likely is or was a federal agent, as he called upon people to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, actually exhorting passersby to “break down the barriers and disregard the police,” yet was never arrested, while others who did far less spent years in prison under appalling conditions.

Most notoriously, however, Fuentes has devoted his energy to making the hatred of Jews more mainstream in the United States than it has ever been before. He has said: “When we take power, the Jews will be needed to be given the death penalty.” He has repeatedly declared his admiration for Adolf Hitler, and has declared that Jews “cannot be allowed” to be in government or to be billionaires in the United States, because “they are a Fifth Column.”

There is much more from Fuentes in this vein, and so when the entirely predictable backlash followed Roberts’ refusal to condemn Carlson for lending this chaos agent his considerable platform, the Heritage top dog moved quickly to stop the bleeding. In a lengthy X post on Friday, Roberts excoriated Fuentes’ “vicious antisemitic ideology, his Holocaust denial, and his relentless conspiracy theories that echo the darkest chapters of history.”

Roberts adds: “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.” And hey, that’s swell. Heritage is going to have a conversation with Fuentes’ followers, and everything is going to be just fine.

That might be convincing if it weren’t for the fact that Heritage, like other groups that dissent from the left’s agenda and ostensibly fight against its dominance, had always been open to having a “conversation” about points of view that don’t necessarily reflect the mainstream. Take, for example, Islamic jihad. Heritage’s website has a “Middle East” section, but nothing about the global jihad except for a handful of articles, some dating back over twenty years. One 2003 article focuses on the jihad group Hizb ut-Tahrir. There’s an even older one, from 2001, about the jihad in Sudan.

One of the more recent posts touching on this issue at the Heritage website is over eight years old; in March 2017, Heritage hosted a presentation entitled “Jihad as Grand Strategy: Islamic Militancy, National Security, and the Pakistani State.” There has been little from the group, however, about the jihad against the West, or the U.S. in particular. In 2012, Heritage published a report entitled “Fifty Terror Plots Foiled Since 9/11: The Homegrown Threat and the Long War on Terrorism,” but since then it seems to have largely lost interest in that long war.

Speakers who oppose jihad violence and Sharia oppression and talk frankly about its roots within Islamic texts and teachings have been decidedly thin on the ground at Heritage. I myself spoke there about Muhammad and how he still serves as the inspiration for global terrorists, but that was back in 2006. Andrew Bostom, author of The Legacy of Jihad, spoke there around 2012. Heritage hosted a panel of foes of jihad in 2014 and another that dealt with the topic in 2018, but more recent such events are extremely difficult to find.

Heritage’s general reluctance even to go near any discussion of the beliefs and motives of Islamic terrorists came as George W. Bush’s September 2001 proclamation that “Islam is peace” gradually became the mainstream view of the issue on the right. High-profile conservatives happily joined the leftists who despised them and wanted to destroy them in branding honest examinations of jihad terrorists’ motivating ideology as “Islamophobia,” and shunned the alleged carriers of this fictional malady accordingly.

Now, however, when it comes to Jew-haters, Heritage and other groups on the right suddenly remember that the resistance movement against leftist hegemony is a big tent, with plenty of room even for toxic flamethrowers such as Nick Fuentes. There are big tents and there are big tents, you see, and not all of them are equal. Particularly not, apparently, when it comes to hating Jews and welcoming into the country the most violent global force arrayed against them. Kevin Roberts knows this. And clearly, he and the Heritage Foundation want you to know it as well.