After days of nearly unanimous condemnation and horror from top Republican senators and congressmen, conservative activists, as well as Heritage Foundation staffers, donors, and members of its board of trustees, in response to Kevin Roberts’s craven embrace of Tucker Carlson and his neo-Nazi podcast guest, Nick Fuentes, the Heritage Foundation president has tried three separate times to shut down the scandal, each time less convincingly than before.
One day after defending Carlson for cozying up to the Stalin-and-Hitler-supporting Fuentes and slamming “the venomous coalition” for “attacking our friends on the Right,” Roberts conceded that he didn’t actually like Fuentes’s predilection for terrorism, genocide, and rape, but said nothing of Carlson. A day later, Roberts threw his baby-faced, terminally online chief of staff, Ryan Neuhaus, under the bus, firing him from the position and exiling him to research housing policy. Yesterday, the Heritage Foundation attempted to deny that its board met to debate whether to fire Roberts, who, according to the Washington Examiner, was one vote away from being fired when his contract was due for renewal after the dumpster fire that was President Donald Trump’s excoriation of Project 2025.
Far from quelling the backlash, Roberts’s machinations over the past week have raised more questions than answers. The think tank, once the most influential in the Republican Party, famously maintains a controversial “one voice” policy that bars staffers from straying from the institution’s official positions. Does that mean that the official position of the Heritage Foundation is never to criticize “our friends on the Right,” and that staffers must regard actual Nazis and their apologists as “our friends on the Right?” Are the Jews who dare to criticize calls for their own genocide part of the “venomous coalition?” What about the “Christian Zionists” whom Carlson claims he “hates more than anybody?”
The problem with the attempt to walk back Roberts’s smug and wholly unnecessary embrace of Carlson and Fuentes is that you can’t really unsay those things. Roberts made clear that while Carlson can spend years publicly obsessing over his weird and creepy loathing of Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin, conservatives simply calling Carlson out for his fixations are the ones he maintains are “sowing division.” Roberts has said Republicans who support the legality of same-sex marriage — a coalition that remains spearheaded by Trump — are no longer “movement conservatives” welcomed by the Heritage Foundation, but nodding along and smiling to declarations of Nazism should be protected from “cancel culture.”
Recall that Roberts could have said absolutely nothing about Carlson’s newfound friendship with Fuentes. As much as Roberts may want to believe otherwise, he is not an actual celebrity; outside of a handful of X accounts beckoning Roberts to condemn Carlson’s interview, nobody’s first thought about America’s premier podcast troll befriending America’s premier neo-Nazi was, “I wonder how the no-name president of this think tank feels about that.”
But Roberts has never seen a spotlight he doesn’t want to thrust himself into, and just as he continued to defy the Trump campaign’s demands that he stop lying that the president was in any way affiliated with Project 2025, Roberts had to insert himself into the news cycle to defend Carlson.
The Heritage Foundation was once the Right’s premier moral gatekeeper and intellectual tastemaker, with founder Ed Feulner helping run Trump’s presidential transition team and the foundation collaborating with Trump on his list of proposed judicial nominees as recently as 2016. Trump plucked several staffers from Heritage’s payroll to work for his first administration. At the higher echelons of the White House, Paul Winfree was appointed deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy, Roger Severino was director of the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services, and James Sherk was the special assistant to the president for domestic policy. They were all Heritage Foundation staff members who went directly from the think tank to the administration.
Fast forward to the second Trump administration, and Heritage Foundation staff are conspicuously absent, with First Son Donald Trump Jr. and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick blacklisting the institution over Project 2025. While Trump allowed some outside contributors to Project 2025 to join the administration, actual Heritage Foundation staffers, such as Severino, who had returned to the think tank before being heavily lobbied to rejoin Trump’s HHS, were rejected by the second administration. When Trump nominated the foundation’s excellent Chief Economist E.J. Antoni to run the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Roberts barely lifted a finger to make the affirmative and obvious case for Antoni, let alone defend him from the actual venomous coalition baselessly smearing Antoni’s character. Roberts issued just four social media posts and one public statement in support of Antoni’s nomination, which would have made him the highest-ranking official to be chosen directly from the Heritage Foundation. Roberts ultimately refused to cut a cushy and defiant 2 1/2-minute video celebrating Antoni, as he would eventually do for Carlson, and Antoni’s nomination was thus allowed to wither and die shamefully on the vine until Trump withdrew it.
Roberts has already overseen the suicidal erosion of the Heritage Foundation’s practical political influence, and he certainly hasn’t justified his million-dollar salary with the foundation’s financials; even during its 50th anniversary in 2023 and the election year of 2024, inflation-adjusted donations were less than those raised in 2013, 2014, and 2019.
THE FBI MUST ANSWER FOR ITS ARCTIC FROST SPYING OPERATION
Both the board and the broader conservative movement have tolerated all of that, resigned to allowing smaller think tanks to fill the void left behind by the Heritage Foundation’s mutation into the cult of Roberts. But Roberts’s decision to weaponize the foundation’s moral authority to defend an antisemite and a conspiracy theorist may have proven a step too far. It’s one thing for Roberts to run away from half a century of the foundation’s classical economics. It’s quite another to run cover for Carlson, calling Christian support for Israeli statehood a “brain virus” and “heresy.”
How the broader conservative movement chooses to respond to the greatest resurgence of Nazism since the Holocaust and how the Heritage Foundation board chooses to respond to Roberts’s defense of its defenders may seem like different conundrums, but with the historic prestige of the foundation hanging in the balance, they’re really the same thing. While Trump has indeed proven himself the greatest champion of the Jewish and Israeli people to occupy the White House, his presidency is over in three short years, while the Heritage Foundation will want to shape the conservative movement that comes after. History has encountered such inflection points before, and to choose wrongly is to choose violence, genocide, and eternal ignominy. The Heritage Foundation would be wise to reclaim its own importance, embrace the venomous coalition that understands a conservative movement that includes Nazis and communists conserves nothing, and find a leader who is interested in, well, leading instead of following said Nazis and communists to the very gates of hell.
