Conservatism at a Crossroads

On Wednesday Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, sat onstage with three other members of the executive team at the conservative think tank’s headquarters for an all-hands meeting. Only six days earlier, he had posted a short video defending Tucker Carlson after the former Fox News host had conducted a lengthy and friendly interview with a prominent online neo-Nazi, Nick Fuentes. 

Roberts was there to explain himself and hear from staffers who were angry and hurt by their leader’s embrace of Carlson, who in his Fuentes interview had elevated the most vile sort of bigot, described Christian public figures who support the state of Israel as detestable people infected with a “brain virus,” and said he “dislikes … more than anybody” people he called “Christian Zionists.” 

Roberts admitted the video in defense of Carlson had been a “mistake” and said he took responsibility for its production and publication—though he explained he had read the script handed to him, after all, because he was facing calls to publicly disavow Carlson after Heritage had “just concluded a paid media partnership with Tucker in the summer.” He also said that while resigning from his post at Heritage (where his total annual compensation is roughly $1 million) would be “very easy,” he considered it his “moral obligation” to stay to clean up the mess he had created by publicly redeclaring his and the organization’s unwavering fidelity to Carlson. He then invited the gathered employees to ask him questions.

What took place next, based on recordings of the meeting obtained by The Dispatch and other news outlets, illustrated not only the stark divide within the Heritage Foundation itself but within the broader conservative movement. Conservatives are at the moment in a prolonged fight about the political right’s post-Donald Trump future. It’s centered around this specific question: Will traditional conservatism merely evolve into a more populist movement, or will it be supplanted by something much darker and illiberal—a blood-and-soil nationalism in which even neo-Nazis are welcome as fellow travelers? 

Wednesday’s meeting at Heritage suggested there’s still some fight left in those conservatives staunchly opposed to such bigotry: For well over an hour, multiple Heritage scholars and employees read Roberts the riot act, the anger and frustration with their leader that had been simmering for a week boiling over.

“The damage done to the reputation of Heritage is the worst I have ever seen,” said Hans von Spakovsky, the former Federal Election Commission member and a veteran senior legal fellow at Heritage.

“I also have every reason to believe you are a good and decent man, and I know that you’re my brother in Christ,” said Amy Swearer, another senior legal fellow. “And yet, after all of the events of the last week, I stand here today with no ability to say I have confidence in your leadership for this institution moving forward.”

Rachel Greszler, a senior research fellow, told Roberts she and her colleagues feel compelled to “promote and defend certain people without regards to their policies or their morals” at the expense of doing their serious policy work. “For me, this latest video, defending Tucker Carlson for platforming somebody who spews murderous hatred and has said some of the most vile and horrendous things, not only about Jews, but also about women and black people, this was the final straw for me,” Greszler said.

Most striking were the remarks from Robert Rector, a scholar at the Heritage Foundation for more than 40 years. Rector addressed the room’s many young people, trying to educate them at length about William F. Buckley Jr., the history of the conservative movement’s self-policing, and the need to keep out both antisemites and, in his words, “lunatics.”

“And we have them back now, okay?” Rector said. “They are both here, back just the way they were in 1959.”

“The issue here is Tucker Carlson,” Rector added. “Tucker’s show is like stepping into a lunatic asylum.”

But moments later an unidentified woman, who is a research assistant, according to a source, spoke up to offer a different perspective. “A handful of young colleagues and I had no issue with the points you made in the original video,” she told Roberts. “Gen Z has an increased unfavorable view of Israel, and it’s not because millions of Americans are antisemitic. It’s because we are Catholic and Orthodox and believe that Christian Zionism is a modern heresy. We believe it does go against church doctrine and the teachings of the early church fathers to use Christianity as a defense for a secular nation.”

Perhaps unwittingly, or perhaps not, this young woman provided a voice for a faction of the conservative movement, many of whom came of age when Trump’s brand of populist and nationalist politics was the only game in town. Such politics, coupled with social media, gave rise to the outright bigotry of online personalities like Fuentes and the transformation of traditional media figures like Carlson into people willing to entertain those bigots in the quest for continued relevance.

This infection is hardly contained to political media. As the Heritage Foundation’s internal crisis demonstrates, Carlson is a key figure within the conservative intellectual world as well as Republican politics itself. Carlson was a prominent speaker at the Republican National Convention in 2024 and was, by all accounts, extremely influential in Trump’s decision to name  J.D. Vance his running mate (and natural successor to his political movement).

In other words, the fight happening at the Heritage Foundation over Carlson and the moral boundaries set by conservative institutions is almost certain to have long-term implications for the leadership of the Republican Party and the country.

So why did Roberts think he could back Carlson without consequence after he’d hosted an antisemite for a friendly interview on his podcast? Perhaps because Roberts and Carlson had been through a similar experience just last year.

In September 2024, Carlson hosted a little-known amateur historian named Darryl Cooper on his podcast, during which Cooper called Winston Churchill the “chief villain of the Second World War,” described the Holocaust as happening almost by accident, and likened the Nazis’ extermination of millions of Jews to Israel’s defensive war against Hamas in Gaza. “I want you to be widely recognized as the most important historian in the United States,” Carlson told Cooper, who had posed with a Nazi-themed coffee mug in a photo posted online a couple weeks before the podcast appearance.

Roberts responded to the outcry over Carlson and Cooper by posting a tweet defending Winston Churchill—and then appearing at a Tucker Carlson Live event the next day. Heritage sent out a “Dear Fellow Patriot” fundraising email under Tucker Carlson’s name just 10 days after Carlson hosted Cooper.

By then, it was hard to deny that Carlson—through his elevation of other antisemites like Kanye West and his obsession with Israel—was engaging in what a younger Carlson called “thematic” antisemitism. “I do believe that there is a pattern with [Pat] Buchanan of needling the Jews. Is that antisemitic? Yeah,” Carlson said on C-SPAN in 1999. “Pat Buchanan obviously has a lot of personal and affectionate relationships with people who are Jewish. So on a personal level, perhaps he’s not, but on a different, maybe thematic level, I think he probably is.” 

Over the past year, Carlson’s thematic antisemitism has grown even worse: In September of this year, he released a 9/11 truther documentary suggesting the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were a “false flag” operation of which Israel had advance knowledge.

But the Fuentes interview crossed a line because Fuentes has not played the slightest bit coy about his antisemitism and Holocaust denial. “Hitler was awesome. Hitler was right. And the Holocaust didn’t happen,” Fuentes said in a video while recounting his radicalization during his first and only year at college. Fuentes dropped out of Boston University after attending the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 where white nationalists and neo-Nazis carrying tiki torches chanted “Jews will not replace us!” the night before the event. During the rally itself, a white-nationalist terrorist murdered a counterprotester with his car, and hours after the murder had occurred, Fuentes wrote on Facebook that the Unite the Right rally was “incredible.” “You will not replace us,” he wrote. “The rootless transnational elite knows that a tidal wave of white identity is coming.”

His bigotry is so vile and well-known that multiple conservative organizations have cut ties with those who associate with Fuentes, and Republican politicians have faced swift condemnation for appearing with or meeting him. In 2019, Turning Point USA fired a “brand ambassador” for posing in a photo with Fuentes, and that same year Young America’s Foundation fired Michelle Malkin for speaking at Fuentes’ “America First” convention. “There is no room in mainstream conservatism or at YAF for holocaust deniers, white nationalists, street brawlers, or racists,” YAF said in a statement. In 2022, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene faced widespread backlash for speaking at Fuentes’ conference (she implausibly claimed she didn’t know who he was). That fall, Donald Trump dined with Kanye West and Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago, prompting backlash from Republicans. Then-Sen. Marco Rubio called Fuentes “evil” and said, “Trump shouldn’t have met with him” and that the meeting “legitimized” Fuentes. Trump claimed that West had “arrived with a guest whom I had never met and knew nothing about.” 

Carlson knew a lot about Fuentes by the time the two men sat down for a friendly two-hour chat on Carlson’s top-rated podcast last month. Just a few months before that, Carlson had spoken out against Fuentes as “this child, this weird little gay kid in his basement in Chicago” and insinuated that Fuentes was being paid by the federal government or another malign force to discredit him. “Every time I had a new show, David Duke would endorse my show,” Carlson said, referring to the neo-Nazi Louisiana politician. “David Duke is obviously part of a campaign to discredit people on the right, obviously, and I think it’s very obvious that Nick Fuentes is exactly the same.” In other words, the pure and direct antisemitism of Fuentes discredited the coy and thematic antisemitism of Tucker Carlson.

What changed between Carlson’s August denunciation of Fuentes and his October softball interview with him? Fuentes continued to attack Carlson as a dishonest elitist, and multiple prominent MAGA media voices publicly suggested Fuentes was winning the fight. On August 6, Carlson’s newfound friend and prominent conspiracy theorist Alex Jones talked up the “explosive popularity” of Fuentes and said the American people had become even more extreme than Fuentes. That same month, Trump’s former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon endorsed a social media post that said Fuentes was “freaking on fire right now.”

In September, Fuentes blasted Carlson for playing coy about remarks that many interpreted to be antisemitic. In Carlson’s remarks at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, Carlson suggested that Kirk was murdered for speaking the truth, just like Jesus. Carlson drew a parallel to the death of Kirk while imagining a “bunch of guys sitting around eating hummus” (a food that did not exist at the time of Jesus) in a “lamplit room” in Jerusalem who plotted to kill Jesus. “And they say I’m the number one antisemite. That was a little intense,” Fuentes said of Carlson’s remarks, before mocking and misstating those comments for the purpose of exaggeration: 

So Carlson’s decision to host Fuentes a month later is best viewed as an attempt to appease Fuentes and maintain credibility with his own audience. The well-known interrogator and debater posed no tough questions to Fuentes about his long history of vile racism and antisemitism.

About an hour into the conversation, Fuentes felt the need to ask Carlson: “What about my views do you think are unreasonable?” 

Carlson replied: “I don’t think it’s cucky; I think it’s reality to say that guilt is not inherited—blood guilt is bad. … Anytime you say a whole group of people is responsible for the sins of some of its members, like, I’m out.” Fuentes went on to dispute Carlson’s characterization of his views while explaining his enemy is “organized Jewry in America” and the inherent connection between “Jewishness, ethnicity, religion, identity” and support for Israel. 

During the interview, Carlson did manage to identify some good Jews: Paul, the Christian saint and convert, and those who oppose the state of Israel. “Things may be generally true,” Carlson said to Fuentes, but “they’re not always true. … In this specific case of Israel, there are a ton of Orthodox who I know who are opposed to the state of Israel. They’re more Jewish than Dave Rubin, a lot more, and yet they oppose it. Jeff Sachs is like the most wonderful man, who’s Jewish, the most articulate critic of the state of Israel.” 

Fuentes described himself during the interview as a big fan of the brutal Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, a man responsible for the deaths of millions. Carlson said he’d circle back to the comment about Stalin but never did. Carlson did find time to call Christian Zionists—a term Carlson did not define—heretics that he dislikes more than anybody.

It’s no surprise, then, that when the president of the Heritage Foundation said Fuentes had said some abhorrent things but should not be “canceled” and attacked those criticizing Carlson as a “venomous coalition … sowing division,” a large number of conservatives inside and outside of Heritage were appalled.

Chris DeMuth, a senior policy expert at Heritage and former president of another D.C.-based conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, resigned his post at Heritage the next day, telling others that Roberts’ defense of Carlson had crossed the line. DeMuth is no member of the stuck-in-the-Reagan-past old guard but was the former chairman of the National Conservatism Conference—the premier annual gathering of the postliberal right. His resignation, therefore, refutes the notion that the fight over Roberts is simply a proxy fight between traditional conservatism and Roberts’ MAGAfied national conservatism.

The writer Rod Dreher, a friend of the postliberal right who has decamped to Viktor Orban’s Hungary, also underscored the fight within national conservatism itself. On October 28, the day before Roberts posted his first video attacking Carlson’s critics, Dreher described the Carlson-Fuentes podcast as a “Two-Man Unite The Right Rally.” He also seems to recognize that this controversy even connects to the White House and the future of the Republican Party. Dreher is a friend of Vice President J.D. Vance: He attended Vance’s baptism in 2019, and earlier this year the vice president introduced Dreher at a Heritage Foundation event promoting Dreher’s documentary Live Not by Lies. Dreher wrote that Vance, at “some rapidly approaching point, has to take a firm, clear public stand against the Groypers (followers of Nick Fuentes). This evil is not going to burn out on its own; it must be stopped … if it can be, at this point.” 

Back in August 2024, Vance condemned Fuentes as a “total loser” and said there isn’t “any room in the MAGA movement” for him. But that was during a general election and before the Fuentes-Carlson non-aggression pact.

Vance is now in a similar position to Kevin Roberts: Both men love and fear Carlson, who is in turn obviously afraid of Fuentes. Vance has gone out of his way to defend Republicans in their 20s and 30s who have faced professional consequences for racist comments. Fuentes has attacked Vance, calling the vice president “a fat race mixer who is married to a Jeet and has a son named Vivek.” 

Yet so far, Vance has not heeded Dreher’s pleas to denounce Fuentes and his followers.

Back at Heritage on Wednesday, Roberts apologized for making multiple mistakes in the production of his video pledging fealty to Carlson. Using the term “venomous coalition” to describe those attacking Carlson, Roberts said, was “a terrible choice of words, especially for our Jewish colleagues and friends who understand that, given history, to be a trope.” He also said he should have clarified there is a “limiting principle” to his opposition to “canceling” anyone on the right, “especially in light of Tucker hosting, not just Fuentes, but a handful of other people.”

“You can say you’re not going to participate in canceling someone … while also being clear, you’re not endorsing everything they’ve said, you’re not endorsing softball interviews, you’re not endorsing putting people on shows,” Roberts said. 

He defended himself in part by claiming ignorance about the extent of vile comments made by Fuentes and other Carlson podcast guests. “I actually don’t have time to consume a lot of news,” Roberts said. “I consume a lot of sports. I don’t consume a lot of podcasts, not even ours.” He also shifted some blame to his chief of staff, who resigned last week, while insisting he wasn’t blame-shifting. “Our former chief of staff at the pen; I’m the one who recorded the video. The buck stops on [my] desk,” Roberts 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.’”

Later that night, Roberts produced yet another video—the latest of several public attempts to put to rest the controversy that had erupted last week. “Everyone has the responsibility to speak up against the scourge of antisemitism, no matter the messenger,” Roberts said. “Heritage and I will do so, even when my friend Tucker Carlson needs challenging.”

Roberts’ pledge to challenge Carlson did not actually include any challenging words for the top-rated podcaster. The future direction of Heritage and the conservative movement will turn on whether Roberts and others in similar positions of power ever find the courage to do so.