‘I made a mistake and I let you down and I let down this institution. Period. Full stop,’ Roberts said, according to a recording obtained by NR.
Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts issued a lengthy apology to his staff during an all-hands meeting on Wednesday after releasing a video statement last week defending Tucker Carlson amid blowback over the right-wing commentator’s interview with avowed antisemite Nick Fuentes.
Roberts began the internal meeting, a recording of which was obtained by National Review, by acknowledging that the last several days have been difficult for Heritage staffers as the backlash to his admittedly ill-considered video reverberated across the American Right — and the divides within Heritage itself spilled into public view on social media.
“I made a mistake and I let you down and I let down this institution. Period. Full stop,” Roberts said.
Roberts’s video was posted to X on Thursday amid widespread speculation that Heritage had begun to distance itself from Carlson in the wake of his Fuentes interview. Roberts made clear in his statement that Heritage would not distance itself from Carlson and condemned the “venomous coalition” seeking to “sow division” within the conservative movement by attacking Carlson.
“I can tell you, with a clear conscience and not making any excuses that those were my intentions to fix all of that, and obviously I didn’t,” Roberts said of his decision to make the video. “I made them worse. The process by that, by which we arrived at the video was also short circuited. It was a violation of our one voice policy.”
The contents of Tuesday’s staff meeting were first reported by the Washington Free Beacon and Jewish News Syndicate. The Heritage Foundation did not respond to a request for comment.
Roberts went on to explain that only he and former chief of staff Ryan Neuhaus, who has since resigned, were involved in crafting the video and conceded that he should have consulted more widely with colleagues before publishing it.
“Our former chief of staff had the pen. I’m the one who recorded the video. The buck stops on the desk in my office in the eighth floor. So whatever accountability comes from this I get and I deserve,” he said.
Roberts also said that he was not familiar with Fuentes’s views when he posted the video.
“I didn’t know much about this Fuentes guy. I still don’t, which underscores the mistake,” Roberts said.
He did, however, apologize to Heritage’s Jewish staffers for using the term “venomous coalition” to describe Carlson’s critics, saying that he was not consciously employing an antisemitic trope.
“The term ‘venomous coalition,’ a terrible choice of words, especially for our Jewish colleagues and friends who understand that, given history, to be a trope used against them. And I very sincerely — very, very, sincerely — apologize to you in particular, and to all of you for using that. It was not my intention to use a trope. I should have been better,” he said.
Roberts’s mea culpa was given a mixed reception, with some Heritage staffers thanking him for his apology while others continued to criticize his initial statement and to question his public friendship with Carlson.
Robert Rector, a welfare scholar who said he has been with Heritage for 47 years, compared Carlson and Fuentes to members of the John Birch Society and argued that they need to be sidelined in the same way that National Review founder William F. Buckley sidelined the Birchers in the 1960’s.
“Tucker’s show is like stepping into a lunatic asylum,” Rector said in remarks first reported by the Beacon, arguing that Carlson failed to confront Fuentes over his bigoted views and also gave a pass to the revisionist amateur historian Darryl Cooper, who argued during an appearance on Carlson’s show that Winston Churchill was the real villain of World War II.
Another staffer told Roberts that many Heritage employees completely lost confidence in his ability to lead the institution.
“Dr. Roberts, over the last week, you have shown a stunning lack of both courage and judgment,” the staffer said. “There’s nothing ambiguous about what we saw happen. Tucker Carlson invited a Holocaust-denying neo-Nazi onto his show and then spent roughly two hours doing little more than flirting with him.”
The meeting exposed something of a generational divide within Heritage, as one staffer who claimed to represent the perspective of the foundation’s younger employees said that she did not have a problem with Roberts’s initial defense of Carlson and wanted to make sure that the views of her generation, who she said were generally more critical of Israel, would still be welcome at Heritage.
“I condemn Nick Fuentes’s hateful rhetoric. That being said, I would like to point out that some of the most vocal people against Tucker Carlson have been calling him an antisemite since he started to hold more anti-interventionist views. A handful of young colleagues and I had no issue with the points you made in the original video,” the staffer said. “As a young person, many of us are generally tired of foreign entanglements, while our problems in this country worsen. My question is: Is there room for people that hold our perspectives on the path forward?”
As the fallout from the Roberts video continues, Heritage leaders are pleading with staff members to stop leaking to the media.
“I would ask those who are leaking to do the honorable thing, and if they don’t feel like they can be on this team, they need to resign,” said one leader.
Another compared leakers to “Judas.”
“If you speak to a journalist about this, you are probably not going to be found out, but you will know in your heart you’re Judas.”
“At today’s scheduled monthly staff town hall, our Heritage team engaged in discussion with our usual spirit of candor,” Heritage Foundation Chief Advancement Officer Andy Olivastro said in a statement to NR. “We are grateful for a team that can handle productive and challenging discourse. Our work at Heritage is difficult — but necessary — and requires open dialogue like the one we had today. Lest anyone be misled, this leak is about the Swamp and Establishment trying to dislodge Heritage, Kevin Roberts, and the broader America First movement, off the battlefield. Our commitment to fight for the American people is unwavering. We will never give up.”
Editor’s note: This post has been updated with a statement from Heritage.