Thread by @ElliotKaufman6

Serious respect to Heritage senior fellow Amy Swearer for an outstanding statement before Kevin Roberts and all Heritage staff.

Thread below:

"As you yourself have said, now is the time for courage. Dr. Roberts, over the last week, you have shown a stunning lack of both courage and judgment."

"Tucker Carlson invited a Holocaust-denying neo-Nazi onto his show, and then spent roughly two hours doing little more than flirting with him."

"And when our friends and allies on the right, staunch conservatives, rightly and reasonably criticize Tucker for throwing softball questions at a Hitler apologist, we had options at that point.

"We could have, and, in my opinion, should have, joined them."

"We also could have just said nothing at all. Instead, we managed to scrape together an initial response that, at best, was equal parts incoherent, unhelpful and naive.

"At worst, it was more akin to a master class in cowardice that ran cover for the most unhinged dregs of the far right.

"The next four days, for me, were even more worrying, because you appeared to dodge, duck, dip, dive and dodge any real semblance of accountability. Nothing about that seemed to indicate you really wanted to buck to stop with you.

"It seemed at first as though you wanted the buck to stop with your chief of staff. And only after it became clear that Ryan [Neuhaus] falling on his sword would be insufficient . . . did we finally see you manage the courage to utter the words: ‘I made a mistake.’

"And quite frankly, even if you had managed to say that four hours after that video, it would’ve been a weak response, but sir, it took you four days to say that."

"We watched you seem perfectly willing to attack all our friends and allies on the right, but say nothing about the guy who said he dislikes nothing more than ‘Christian Zionists,’ a term he seems to use to mean basically anyone who supports Israel and includes many people in this room."

"Those are not the actions of man who ‘knows what time it is.’ Frankly, I’m not even sure they’re the actions of a man who knows how to tell time."

"I want to just address quickly the inevitable next question, ‘Amy, if you don’t have faith in this leadership, shouldn’t you just resign?’ No."

"By resigning, we would accomplish nothing. We would only manage to hold the wrong person accountable for what, frankly, I can only characterize as an institutional series of horrible, terrible, no-good, very bad self-imposed injuries that we’ve seen.”