NEW: Heritage President Apologizes, Claims To Have Been Blindsided

Better late than never, but better to have avoided getting involved in the first place. Especially, as Heritage president Kevin Roberts claims, he didn’t know much about the issue before intervening in it. 

The Washington Free Beacon obtained video of a meeting today at the august conservative think tank after Roberts asked the board to address the staff. Referring to his defense of Tucker Carlson and his interview with Nick Fuentes, whose Stalinophilia blew up the final weeks of the election season. “I made a mistake,” Roberts told his staff, and in the process admitted to a series of them:

“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.” …

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.”

One limiting principle would be to research the issue before issuing statements on behalf of the organization. Admitting that he still “didn’t know much about this Fuentes guy,” Roberts explained that he simply trusted his now-former chief of staff to do his thinking for him. “This is an explanation, not an excuse,” Roberts told Heritage staff:

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.’”

That sounds like both an excuse and an explanation. It is almost certainly the truth, but only because an official who rises to leadership of a respected institution like Heritage would never publicly admit to this level of incompetence otherwise. Roberts admits that he took no steps to discern the issue personally, let alone carefully, and allow his staffer to manipulate him into intervening in a public controversy that had already erupted without double-checking his work. It’s not as if Fuentes was an obscure figure, even before Carlson’s softball interview; a simple Google search and five to ten minutes of click-throughs would have been sufficient to expose the political minefield into which Roberts blithely danced. Roberts presumably chose Neuhaus as his trusted aide, too, so his judgment is in question in all directions. 

Roberts did have the integrity to accept responsibility for the debacle and to do so in front of the staff — at least, the staff still remaining. However, Robert Rector didn’t let him off the hook. The five-decade Heritage scholar took Roberts to the woodshed over the idea that excluding Nazi sympathizers and white supremacists means “cancel culture”:

 “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.”

Putting aside the specific individuals involved, Rector is exactly correct. The conservative movement divorced itself of white supremacists and conspiracy theorists, as well as those who platform and promote them, as a matter of hygiene and survival. No one is suggesting government censorship of such points of view, but free speech does not mean free access to private platforms, nor does criticism over one’s positions amount to “cancel culture.” 

Will Roberts resign? It sounds as though he intends to at least offer a resignation to the Heritage Foundation’s board. Given the damage this episode has done and the incompetence this explanation/excuse has revealed, it would not be surprising if the board accepted it and looked for a more discerning leader for Heritage’s future. 

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