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“I disagree with, and even abhor, things that Nick Fuentes says, but cancelling him is not the answer,” Roberts said. Conservatives must focus on dismantling “the vile ideas of the left”, he said, not “attacking our friends on the right”.

Roberts also drove a stake in the ground on right-wing criticism of Israel. “Christians can critique the state of Israel without being antisemitic,” he said.

“When it serves the interest of the United States to co-operate with Israel and other allies, we should do so. But when it doesn’t, conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class, or from their mouthpieces in Washington.”

It was a reminder that support for Israel is not necessarily an article of faith on the right, at least in nationalist, isolationist, Catholic and Orthodox Christian wings of the MAGA movement.

By contrast, Trump gave Israel extraordinary cover to pursue its regional security objectives, including bombing campaigns in Iran and Yemen, and has been praised by Benjamin Netanyahu as the best friend Israel has ever had in the White House. Trump reined in Netanyahu only when the Israeli prime minister overplayed his hand by launching strikes inside Qatar.

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Roberts faced an immediate backlash for his intervention. Several volunteers on the Heritage Foundation’s National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, an initiative formed in the aftermath of Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack, resigned – as did a number of employees, including chief of staff Ryan Neuhaus.

At a crisis staff meeting – video of which was leaked to the Washington Free Beacon – Roberts apologised, saying he made a mistake and let the team down. He said he was being pressured by high-profile people to declare that Carlson was “no longer part of the conservative movement”.

In his apology, Roberts said one could maintain the principle of not cancelling friends while making it clear one did not endorse everything a person said, or their decisions to platform certain people.

He also confessed to an odd degree of ignorance. “I don’t consume a lot of news,” Roberts said. “I didn’t know much about this Fuentes guy – I still don’t, which underscores the mistake.”

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This is no small barney. Compared with Australia, for example, Washington think tanks are hulking institutions, deeply ingrained in policymaking; especially one like the Heritage Foundation, which claims to be the intellectual backbone and battleship of the conservative movement.

The leaked staff meeting provided a neat encapsulation of the bigger battle at play. Two women, Amy Swearer and Rachel Greszler, spoke passionately and candidly about their lack of confidence in Roberts’ leadership and their dismay that he ran cover for “the most unhinged dregs of the far right”.

But they were followed by another woman who said she and her younger colleagues had no issue with what Roberts said in the video, and that Carlson had been painted as antisemitic only as he developed more anti-interventionist views on foreign policy.

“Gen Z has an increasingly unfavourable view of Israel, and it’s not because millions of Americans are antisemitic. It is because we are Catholic and Orthodox and believe that Christian Zionism is a modern heresy,” she said. “Many of us are generally tired of foreign entanglements while our problems in this country worsen.”

The questioner wanted to know if there was room at the Heritage Foundation for critics of the US’s relationship with Israel. Roberts said there was, telling her: “That’s the difficulty in the conservative movement right now; trying to figure out how we can all respect each other’s differences of opinions, particularly on the question that you raised, and work together.”

But others are explicit: there is no room in the tent for antisemites and cranks. Amid the furore, Republican senator Ted Cruz has become one of the leading conservative voices demanding more people speak out and accusing Carlson of laundering poisonous, dangerous ideas.

“In the last six months, I’ve seen more antisemitism on the right than I have in any time of my life,” Cruz told the Federalist Society at a function in Washington. “It is growing, it is metastasising … and it is in particular finding purchase with the young.”

Cruz said his colleagues were horrified by what was happening, but they were frightened because Carlson had such a big megaphone. “Fuentes and Tucker and the rest of that ilk have a right to say what they are saying, but every one of us has an obligation to stand up and say it is wrong.”

It’s surely not just Carlson’s megaphone that scares people. It is the fact that what he represents is not a fringe slither of the alt-right, but a chunk of the MAGA coalition that someone – most likely Vice President JD Vance – will need to hold together in 2028.

Michael Koziol is the North America correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald.

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