Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts has been out defending the substance of his statement last week refusing to “cancel” (sic) Tucker Carlson and harshly denouncing “bad actors” who wish to dissociate him from the conservative movement. Today behind closed doors in a meeting with foundation staff Roberts has backtracked. He states that he “made a mess” that he now wants to clean up.
My daughter Eliana reports on today’s Heritage staff meeting here. Roberts blames the statement in the video on his former chief of staff:
Roberts used his remarks to explain how the video came to be posted. “This is an explanation, not an excuse,” he said, telling staffers that the think tank was under pressure to “make a statement” that Carlson was “no longer part of the conservative movement.”
Roberts said 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.’”
He went on to apologize for the use of the term “venomous coalition,” describing it as a “terrible choice of words, especially for our Jewish colleagues and friends,” adding that his friend, the Israeli-American scholar Yoram Hazony, the author of The Virtue of Nationalism, traveled to Washington, D.C., to help him stem the self-inflicted crisis.
Jack Crowe and Audrey Fahlberg also report on the meeting for Natinoal Review here.
The Washington Free Beacon has obtained a video of today’s Heritage staff meeting (below). It is worth watching in part for the statement of Heritage senior research fellow Robert Rector. At 22:00, Rector eloquently makes points I have made here several times. As Eliana reports:
Roberts took questions from the audience, including from Robert Rector, a welfare scholar, who described himself as a 47-year veteran of the Heritage Foundation—”longer than most of you have been alive,” he said.
He harkened back to William F. Buckley Jr., the National Review founder. “I hope you know who he is,” Rector said. “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.”
Rector has more along this line. Roberts says he agrees with Rector and reiterates the evasive yammering he has offered in damage control since last week. I see no evidence that Roberts understands the Tucker Carlson problem as stated by Rector. Perhaps Victor Davis Hanson’s Free Press essay on The new antisemitism” might help. Then again, maybe not. The brutal questions that follow elicit more of the same. Roberts to the contrary notwithstanding, Tucker Carlson cannot be part of a decent conservative movement. The video itself shows what a vile and destructive force he has become. To borrow Roberts’s formulation: “Period. Full stop.”
The video below was not for public consumption. A spokeswoman for Heritage did not immediately respond to Eliana’s request for comment or to National Review’s.
UPDATE: Andrew Bernard also covers the story for JNS.
