[Video below.] Just as countries must have borders to exist, the conservative movement needs to delineate what is beyond the pale, and the latter includes Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who has both denounced core conservative tenets of late and given voice to and failed to denounce antisemites and Holocaust deniers.
That was one of the messages Ben Shapiro, a Jewish conservative commentator and Daily Wire cofounder, shared in a Dec. 17 book talk with Kevin Roberts, president of Heritage Foundation.
Roberts has drawn criticism after failing to denounce Carlson, and a panel on Jew-hatred that used to be at the think tank has, at least temporarily, suspended its connection to Heritage, and several board and staff members at the think tank have resigned or left their positions.
Shapiro advised the think tank to part ways with Carlson, whom he called the “elephant in the room.” The Jewish commentator was there ostensibly to discuss his new book, Lions and Scavengers: The True Story of America (and Her Critics).
“If Heritage Foundation wishes to retain its status as a leading thought institution in the conservative movement, it must act as ideological border control,” Shapiro told attendees. “It must continue to draw the contours of legitimate, real conservatism. This is what the institution exists to do.”
Shapiro said conservatism’s top priority is “truth, not friendship,” calling Carlson “an opponent of conservatism, an outsider masquerading as an insider and destroying the character of the conservative movement in the process.”
That call for daylight between Heritage and Carlson came as two of the think tank’s board members, Shane McCullar and Abby Spencer Moffat, stepped down as trustees after Roberts defended Carlson and his softball interview with Holocaust denier and racist podcaster Nick Fuentes.
McCullar said, “No institution that hesitates to condemn antisemitism and hatred, or that gives a platform to those who spread them, can credibly claim to uphold the vision that once made the Heritage Foundation the world’s most respected conservative think tank,” Mediate reported.
And Moffat said the think tank had forfeited “the moral authority on which its influence depends,” the outlet said.
Shapiro said Carlson “sounds so much” like a socialist, has foreign policy views that are “idiocy” and has “glazed” the Iranian president “repeatedly” in interviews.
Carlson treated Qatar “as America’s foremost ally in the Middle East” and has a “peculiar obsession” with Israel, according to Shapiro, who noted that the podcaster has called Christian Zionism a “heresy.”
“He is mostly lying when he says that he is doing all of this in the name of a conservatism that does not resemble conservatism,” Shapiro said.
After the speech, Shapiro sat down with Roberts to talk about his book. “We love robust debate,” Roberts said, without addressing the institution’s support of Carlson directly.
“And surprises,” Shapiro quipped. JNS
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{Matzav.com}
