This week, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts defended Tucker Carlson and his decision to interview Holocaust revisionist and provocateur Nick Fuentes. Roberts seemed to be making a cold political calculation — the Republican Party, it would seem, needs Carlson more than it needs traditional pro-Israel consensus. Roberts even suggested that Nick Fuentes deserved debate rather than deplatforming, framing him as another victim of cancel culture.

The foundation had quietly scrubbed references to Carlson from a donation page after the former Fox News host told Fuentes he “dislikes” Christian Zionists “more than anybody”. But Roberts quickly reversed course, posting a video that attacked Carlson’s critics as “globalists” and “mouthpieces in Washington”, language that echoes Fuentes’s own rhetoric about “organised Jewry”.

This represents something new in Republican politics. America’s premier conservative think tank understands that it cannot risk alienating Carlson’s massive following and Fuentes’s growing support base, which has been expanded by recent Israel-bashing comedic forays onto the Red Scare and Sam Hyde Show podcasts. When Roberts says conservatives shouldn’t “reflexively support any foreign government”, he’s acknowledging that the GOP coalition now includes people who are actively hostile to Israel. Losing them would mean losing elections.

Just 10 years ago, the Tea Party rallied with “Stand with Israel” signs in Tel Aviv. Most Republican candidates competed to show the most fervent support for the Jewish state. Strong anti-Israel voices like populist former Ohio Congressman James Traficant, who spent much of his career defending the likes of alleged Nazi prison guard John Demjanjuk, were consigned to the sidelines of the mainstream. Now the party’s intellectual infrastructure has shifted towards a more ambivalent position on Israel. This is a positive step in one sense — no foreign government should be above criticism, as Roberts noted — but it is also troubling that it came from someone as problematic as Fuentes.

Writer Richard Hanania, who has distanced himself from the Right over the past two years, responded to Roberts’s video with four words: “The Groypers have won.” David Reaboi, a former Claremont fellow and longtime conservative foreign policy voice, desperately tried to explain that supporting Israel doesn’t make someone a “globalist”. But such protests sound like the last gasps of a dying consensus.

JD Vance himself embodies this transformation. The former venture capitalist who once called Trump “America’s Hitler” now questions aid to Israel and praises Carlson’s “courageous” foreign policy views. At the recent TPUSA event in Mississippi, he even went so far as to thank the Israel critics in the audience for strengthening the conservative movement, saying the party doesn’t need “people who agree with us on every single issue”.

Heritage’s calculation, then, makes sense in the short term. Roberts understands that criticising Carlson risks the same fate that befell Jeb Bush and other centrists, so-called “cuckservatives”, when they crossed Trump in the 2016 primaries. It’s better to frame antisemitism as a free speech issue than risk losing the “based” faction of the party.

Of course, the Republican Party still depends heavily on pro-Israel donors like Miriam Adelson, who received several shout-outs from Trump during his recent Knesset address. Jewish Republicans who have warned about rising antisemitism on the Right, like writer Jonah Goldberg, called Vance’s performance at Ole Miss “a profile in cowardice.” Eventually, this growing divide will become untenable.

There’s nothing wrong with Republicans developing a more sceptical view of foreign entanglements or questioning unconditional support for any ally. However, when provocateurs like Fuentes become the loudest voices shaping that conversation, they poison legitimate policy debates with their incendiary rhetoric or outright trolling. Both Heritage and the Republican Party could pay for choosing to placate their base rather than simply making good-faith arguments.

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Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work

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