The New York Times reports:

Kevin D. Roberts is the president of the Heritage Foundation, a powerful think tank at the center of conservative politics. He makes more than $800,000 a year. He manages a budget of $100 million. He has a doctorate in history.

Now, he is trying to escape a gaffe that could derail his career. So he is asking allies to believe something at odds with his sophisticated credentials: He erred out of ignorance, because he does not follow current events.

“I actually don’t have time to consume a lot of news,” Mr. Roberts told staff members at the Heritage Foundation last week. “I consume a lot of sports.”

A few days before that, Mr. Roberts had appeared to throw the full weight of the Heritage Foundation onto one side of a bitter conservative family fight over the rise of the white nationalist Nick Fuentes. After the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson conducted a friendly interview with Mr. Fuentes, Mr. Roberts posted a video on social media that defended Mr. Carlson and called his critics “the globalist class” and a “venomous coalition.”

Mr. Roberts, who quickly faced blowback within his own organization, apologized and sought to shift blame. He said the words he read aloud in the video had been written by an aide, who has since resigned.

“I didn’t know much about this Fuentes guy,” he said in the staff meeting, according to a video posted online by The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news outlet. “I still don’t.”

That has not satisfied Mr. Roberts’s critics, who wanted him to delete the video and make a more forceful denunciation of Mr. Fuentes’s racist and antisemitic rhetoric. Some of them, in fact, saw Mr. Roberts’s excuse as a new kind of insult — asking them to believe the implausible.

“Who could believe that the head of a think tank doesn’t think?” said Charles Jacobs, the president of the Jewish Leadership Project, which resigned from a Heritage Foundation task force meant to fight antisemitism after Mr. Roberts’s video was released.

“If it’s true, he’s incompetent, and he should leave for that reason,” Mr. Jacobs said. “And if it’s not true, he’s a liar.” [Continue reading…]