Heritage Boss Apologizes for Defending Tucker Carlson

"I made a mistake and I let you down and I let down this institution. Period. Full Stop," Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts told the staff of the conservative think tank on Wednesday, a week after he posted a video decrying a "venomous" coalition attacking the right-wing podcast host Tucker Carlson—and declaring the Heritage Foundation would always defend him against "the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda."

Roberts said he was willing to resign but felt a "moral obligation" to repair the situation and had told the organization’s board of directors: "I made the mess, let me clean it up."

While Roberts stated unequivocally in his original video that the Heritage Foundation would never cancel "our friends," he said Wednesday he should have made clear there was a "limiting principle."

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 his 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.