By: Fern Sidman – Jewish Voice News

In recent months, a series of explosive episodes catalogued by The New York Times has drawn unprecedented scrutiny to Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, whose public denunciations of antisemitism increasingly compete with actions and rhetoric that have led critics to accuse him of enabling—and even quietly harboring—anti-Jewish sentiment. Though Roberts insists he is committed to fighting antisemitism, the pattern that emerges from his public behavior, political alliances, and linguistic choices has led many observers—inside and outside the conservative movement—to question whether his condemnations mask a deeper hostility, particularly toward liberal or politically unaligned Jews who challenge his ideological worldview.

The controversy that now threatens to overshadow Roberts’s tenure began in late October 2025, when the Heritage president released a video defending former Fox News host Tucker Carlson after Carlson published an interview with Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist, Holocaust denier, and avowed antisemite. According to a report that appeared on November 13^th in The New York Times, the Carlson-Fuentes interview immediately sparked outrage across the political spectrum. Fuentes, who has been explicit for years about his belief that “organized Jewry” undermines American unity, used the platform to reiterate conspiratorial claims historically associated with virulent antisemitism.

Yet rather than disavow Carlson’s decision to amplify Fuentes’s views, Roberts leapt to Carlson’s defense and directed his ire toward Carlson’s critics. In the widely circulated video, Roberts described those critics as a “venomous coalition” and part of a sinister “globalist class.” Media reports indicated that Jewish leaders, historians, and conservative policy experts immediately recognized both phrases as longstanding antisemitic tropes—coded language often deployed by individuals seeking to target Jews without naming them.

Roberts, who for years has positioned himself as a guardian of traditional conservatism, insisted in an internal meeting that he was unaware of Fuentes’s explicit antisemitic record when he recorded the video. But critics, many of whom spoke to The New York Times, were unconvinced. For them, the choice of language—words that have been the bread and butter of antisemitic agitators for decades—reflected not ignorance but the latest example of a troubling drift in Roberts’s public posture, a drift that coincides with his rebranding of himself from an affable Catholic academic into a hard-edged culture warrior.

Roberts eventually apologized during an all-hands staff meeting at Heritage headquarters. He attributed the most inflammatory wording to his chief of staff, who resigned soon afterward. But as media reports indicated, staffers inside the institution reacted to the apology with visible skepticism. One senior legal fellow, Amy Swearer, publicly rebuked Roberts during the meeting, accusing him of delivering a “master class in cowardice” and refusing to take personal responsibility for language he had chosen to speak on camera. She told him bluntly: “Those are not the actions of a man who knows what time it is. Frankly, I’m not even sure they’re the actions of a man who knows how to tell time.”

Even after Roberts issued additional statements condemning Fuentes’s Holocaust denial and white-nationalist ideology, critics continued to argue that Roberts’s failure to disavow Carlson’s platforming of Fuentes signaled that the Heritage president was more concerned with protecting ideological allies than safeguarding the Jewish community from the proliferation of extremist ideas.

Several Jewish Republicans went further, suggesting that Roberts’s rhetoric seemed to reveal a latent antagonism—especially toward Jews who are not politically aligned with the hard-right populism shaping the modern conservative movement. In their view, the mea culpas rang hollow, and the speed with which Roberts rushed to defend a figure who handed an unfiltered platform to Fuentes betrayed impulses that no public relations statement could undo.

To understand why the Fuentes episode resonated so profoundly, The New York Times looked back at Roberts’s evolution in recent years. When he arrived at the Heritage Foundation in 2021 after leading Wyoming Catholic College and later the Texas Public Policy Foundation, Roberts was regarded as a genial conservative intellectual rooted in faith and tradition. But his tone and public persona shifted sharply as he reshaped Heritage into a fortress for the populist right.

One especially revealing moment came when Roberts declared in a 2024 podcast interview: “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” The report described this as “ominous language of the far right,” deeply discordant with the reserved tone expected from the head of a premier policy institution.

Several conservative thinkers including policy analyst Oren Cass, argued that Roberts had abdicated the principled, moderating responsibilities once associated with Heritage leadership. Cass emphasized that Roberts’s excuses in the Fuentes video scandal—particularly his comparison to the fictional, oblivious news anchor Ron Burgundy—were difficult to reconcile with the gravity of his role. “He must have mentally processed the words he was speaking,” Cass wrote, rejecting Roberts’s attempt to distance himself from the language he delivered on camera.

Much of the criticism has been fueled by the Heritage Foundation’s abrupt repositioning under Roberts’s leadership. Long seen as the intellectual backbone of mainstream Republicanism—spanning from Reaganomics to the Tea Party era—Heritage shifted dramatically in 2023 and 2024 as Trump reasserted dominance over the GOP.

Initially, Roberts allowed Heritage to maintain some distance from Trump. The foundation invited Gov. Ron DeSantis, then thought to be Trump’s most formidable primary challenger, to deliver its gala address, an omission widely interpreted as a slight against Trump. But once DeSantis faltered and Trump reclaimed control of the party, Roberts recalibrated at high speed.

By early 2024, Roberts openly embraced Trump’s claims questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 election. Asked by The New York Times whether he believed President Biden won fairly, Roberts replied, “No,” while conceding that he had no concrete evidence of fraud. “Is it possible he won? Sure. But can I say definitively that he won? No.”

Under Roberts, Heritage also became the driving force behind Project 2025, the nearly 900-page policy blueprint outlining the institutional architecture of a second Trump administration. The document included proposals such as mass deportations, dismantling the Department of Education, and significantly reducing the independence of the Department of Justice. It also contained social-policy ideas noticeably out of sync with Trump’s public messaging, including a call to outlaw pornography nationwide.

When Democrats seized on Project 2025 to attack Trump during the 2024 campaign, Trump’s team quickly distanced itself, prompting Heritage to fire Paul Dans, the project’s director, citing allegations of abusive behavior. Dans publicly accused Heritage of defamation and scapegoating before later reconciling with the institution and launching a Senate campaign.

For critics, however, the most alarming shift has been the foundation’s increasing proximity to extremist figures and language. Heritage, once a home for Reaganite conservatism, now appears to sit at the crossroads of populism, Christian nationalism, and ideological pugilism.

Against this backdrop, Roberts’s defense of Carlson’s interview with Fuentes struck many Jewish observers as more than an isolated misstep. Rather, as one academic told The New York Times, it felt like “the culmination of a pattern,” in which Roberts consistently directs empathy, benefit of the doubt, and rhetorical protection toward ideologues whose worldview often positions Jews—especially liberal Jews—as obstacles to the political order they envision.

Though Roberts insists he is committed to combating antisemitism—pointing to a Heritage-supported initiative designed for precisely that purpose—the timing has not escaped notice. The initiative, critics say, functions largely as a shield, providing institutional cover for Roberts even as he engages in actions that, to outside observers, resemble dog-whistles or accommodationist gestures. As one former put it, “It is hard to take seriously a defensive wall built after the fire has already spread.”

Roberts’s personal background complicates the picture but also sheds light on the subtle suspicions surrounding his rhetoric and alliances. Born in Lafayette, Louisiana, Roberts grew up amid the economic turbulence of the oil industry and became a standout debater in high school, drawn early to the vocabulary and style of conservative firebrand Pat Buchanan—a figure known for his sharp critiques of Israel’s influence on American policy.

Though Roberts has never publicly endorsed Buchanan’s more controversial views, critics point to Buchanan’s long shadow as evidence that Roberts’s instincts may lean toward a worldview that views Jewish participation in American political life with suspicion—especially when it challenges conservative populism.

His academic work, culminating in a doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin, centered on the historical transformation of enslaved populations in Louisiana. Yet, professionally, Roberts found his ideological footing not in scholarship but in building conservative institutions—first at Wyoming Catholic College, where restrictive campus rules and a rejection of federal aid attracted attention, and later at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, where he championed positions that pushed the state’s political culture even further to the right.

Despite the mounting controversies, the Heritage Foundation’s board of trustees has thus far declined comment on Roberts’s future. The foundation did confirm through a spokesperson that Roberts’s chief of staff, who drafted the controversial language in the Fuentes video, had left the organization.

The internal fractures, however, remain unmistakable. Staffers, donors, and policy allies describe an institution increasingly defined by ideological fervor rather than intellectual rigor—a transformation accelerated by Roberts’s willingness to flirt with rhetoric that resonates with far-right audiences, even when such language carries unmistakable antisemitic undertones.

And yet Roberts continues to project confidence. After Trump’s second electoral victory, he released a book featuring a foreword by Vice President J.D. Vance—though Vance has avoided public comment on Roberts since the Fuentes controversy erupted.

If Roberts’s critics are correct, the real issue is not what he says in scripted condemnations of antisemitism, but rather whom he chooses to defend, whom he protects, and which audiences he appears eager to court. In that calculus, the concern—as articulated repeatedly by Jewish Republicans and conservative scholars—is that Roberts’s actions reveal a posture far more troubling than his polished statements admit.

For now, the Heritage Foundation stands at a crossroads. Once revered as the intellectual heart of mainstream conservative policy, it now risks becoming a vessel for populist fervor tinged with the rhetoric of exclusion—particularly toward Jews who fall outside the ideological boundaries Roberts appears to favor.

One thing has become clear: the questions surrounding Kevin Roberts are no longer about a single video or a single misjudgment. They now reach to the core of what Heritage has become—and what, under Roberts’s stewardship, it may yet becom