The remarks by the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, on antisemitism were shocking, coming as they did from a conservative organization that helped welcome Jews into the world of the right and counted the Cold War hero Midge Decter as one of its trustees. The immediate dispute is over the decision of podcaster Tucker Carlson to platform Nick Fuentes, an antisemite and denier of the Holocaust. It is a moment of choice for the right. 

Mr. Roberts, rather than denouncing Messrs. Carlson and Fuentes, instead took aim at the “venomous coalition” that has objected to them and vowed the “attempt to cancel” Mr. Carlson will fail. Mr. Roberts called Mr. Carlson a “close friend” of Heritage and vowed that he “always will be.” Mr. Roberts added that “Christians can critique the state of Israel without being antisemitic” and that “my loyalty as a Christian and as an American is to Christ first.”

We take a backseat to no one in our celebration of religious faith. But Mr. Roberts pairs that declaration with the sour observation that “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.” He reasons that “cancelling” Mr. Fuentes is not the correct approach. He urges focus on the “vile ideas of the left.”   

Was such a critique issued when Mr. Fuentes said that “perfidious Jews” ought to executed? Or when he professed “I love Hitler” or railed against “Talmudic Jews”? Or when Mr. Carslon, at Charlie Kirk’s funeral, invoked the “hummus eaters of Jerusalem” to allude to the nonsensical slander that Israel was behind the murder? Mr. Fuentes railed to Mr. Carlson about  “organized Jewry in America,” to no pushback.            

Mr. Roberts’s remarks are all the more striking, coming as they do close to the 60th anniversary of Nostra Aetate, the Catholic Church’s statement of its kinship with the Jews after millennia of persecution. A member of Heritage’s board, the professor Robert George, in 2023 issued “a plea to my fellow Catholics — especially Catholic young people: Stay a million miles from this evil” — meaning antisemitism — “Do not let it infect your thinking.”

An astute observer of the right, James Lindsay, tells our A.R. Hoffman and Rebecca Sugar on the “Sanity” podcast that the Carlson faction could “destroy the Republican Party” if the faction is not repudiated. He calls that effort “a difficult test that we are about to be put through.” By that measure, Heritage, which has in the past grasped the problem of antisemitism, has failed with flying colors. Mr. Fuentes complained to Mr. Carlson about “these Zionist Jews.” 

Others, though, have grasped the danger — to conservatives, to Jews, to America — of Messrs. Carslon and Fuentes. On Thursday Senator Ted Cruz declared in respect of Mr. Carlson that “Now is a time for choosing. If you sit there with someone who says Adolf Hitler was very cool and that their mission is to defeat ‘global Jewry,’ and you say nothing, then you are a coward, and you are complicit in that evil.” 

The chief executive officer of the Republican Jewish Committee, Matthew Brooks, characterizes his group as “appalled, offended and disgusted.” Writing in the Times, David French laments that “The fringe is now the mainstream, and one of the most powerful institutions in the American right is bending the knee.” John Podhoretz, Decter’s son who has a gift for understatement, calls Mr. Roberts a “rancid wretch of an amoeba.”

One commentator, David Limbaugh, a devout Christian, writes on X that “one thing is clear — something ugly is going on on the right and it may be bigger than I wanted to believe. We must head it off at the pass.” He contends that Mr. Carlson’s “interview and elevation of Fuentes was over the top and monumentally troubling. Do you guys realize what a freak show this guy is?” The greater concern is that Mr. Fuentes is being elevated because of his beliefs.   

We get that some conservatives reckon that the explosion of antisemitism on the left in the wake of October 7 is the primary danger. New York City is on the verge of electing an avowed socialist who despises Israel. It would be a fatal mistake, though, to ignore the toxicity rising on the right. Messrs. Carlson and Fuentes are at the van, pushing to hijack a cause for their own nefarious ends. There are, alas, enemies on the right.