Kevin Roberts looked straight into the camera. It was October 30th, and the president of the Heritage Foundation and architect of Project 2025 had something to say.
Three days earlier, Tucker Carlson had sat down with Nick Fuentes — a 27-year-old white nationalist who calls the Holocaust “a cookie-baking event” and posted “Your body, OUR CHOICE” directed at women the night Trump won reelection. The interview ran over two hours. Eighteen million people watched on X, and now Roberts was recording a video to defend it.
“The Heritage Foundation didn’t become the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement by canceling our own people or policing the consciences of Christians, and we won’t start doing that now,” Roberts declared. Carlson was a “close friend of the Heritage Foundation,” he said. Would “always” be. As for Fuentes: “I disagree with and even abhor things that Nick Fuentes says, but canceling him is not the answer either.” Anyone who thought otherwise? A “venomous coalition.”
What Roberts didn’t mention: he hadn’t actually watched the interview. He’d admit that later, after his chief of staff resigned, after his own employees revolted during an all-hands meeting that got leaked to the press, after the antisemitism task force he’d built collapsed, after board members quit and senior fellows walked, and the Wall Street Journal editorial board called it “stunning negligence” as Republican senators scattered.
Kevin Roberts promised a “Second American Revolution” in 2024. What he got in 2025 was a civil war inside his own building.
The Mainstreaming
The interview aired on Carlson’s podcast on October 27th. Carlson pushed back occasionally, but mostly he let Fuentes talk — and Fuentes had plenty to say. He declared himself “a fan” of Stalin. He went after “organized Jewry” in American politics. Carlson, for his part, announced that nobody bothers him more than “Christian Zionists” — a category that includes Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Trump’s Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, he noted — and accused them of having a “brain virus.”
Fuentes doesn’t hide what he is. “Jews are running society, women need to shut the fuck up, Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part” — that was March 2025. “I think the Holocaust is exaggerated. I don’t hate Hitler” — March 2023.
He’d been getting sanitized for months by conservative podcasters before Carlson came calling. Tim Pool called him “the voice of reason.” Patrick Bet-David gave him 2.7 million views. After YouTube banned him, Fuentes moved to Rumble — the platform where J.D. Vance is an investor. Four years ago, his Rumble shows pulled a few thousand views. Now he regularly clears a million.
The Siberia of Heritage
Ryan Neuhaus wrote the script for Roberts’ October 30th video. He was Heritage’s chief of staff, and within days, he’d been reassigned to the housing department, what one source called “the Siberia of Heritage,” and then he was gone. Yet the sacrifice was not enough.
The New York Post obtained internal Heritage chats. Staff were furious. “The most embarrassed I’ve ever been to be a Heritage employee,” one wrote. “It’s not close.” Another asked if colleagues were “part of the venomous coalition for calling out Tucker for playing footsie with literal Nazis?” A third: “Saying we can’t cancel someone is safe space wokeism.” A fourth warned that “if we are labeled on the same side as Nick Fuentes, then we deserve to lose” — then added something chilling: “Talking with some of the interns, I think that there are a growing number of them who actually agree” with Fuentes.
Heritage was hemorrhaging evangelical and Jewish donors. References to the organization’s sponsorship of Carlson’s network got scrubbed from the donations page.
On November 2nd, Mark Goldfeder quit. He was CEO of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, an Orthodox rabbi, and a member of Heritage’s antisemitism task force. As he wrote in his resignation letter, “Elevating him [Fuentes] and then attacking those who object as somehow un-American or disloyal in a video replete with antisemitic tropes and dog whistles, no less, is not the protection of free speech.” On X, he posted a warning: “In 1930s Europe, the most dangerous ideas did not begin in the streets but in the lecture halls and salons of the educated elite, who insisted that Nazi racial theories deserved equal time.”
“Like Stepping Into a Lunatic Asylum”
Heritage had a monthly all-staff meeting scheduled for November 6th. The Washington Free Beacon was leaked video. NPR got audio.
Roberts opened with an apology: “I made a mistake, and I let you down, and I let down this institution. Period. Full stop.” Then he offered an explanation that landed badly: “I actually don’t have time to consume a lot of news. I don’t mean this as a fake attempt at lightheartedness. I consume a lot of sports. I don’t consume a lot of podcasts, not even ours.”
One by one, his staff rose to tell him what they thought.
Robert Rector had spent 47 years at Heritage as a senior research fellow. He told Roberts that “Tucker’s show is like stepping into a lunatic asylum.” Then he reached back to William F. Buckley’s boundaries from the early 1960s: “You have to expunge all antisemitism, all of it. But that’s just part of it… the other is you have to expel the lunatics. OK? The lunatics who think that Eisenhower is a communist. And we have them back now. OK? They are both here, back, just the way they were in 1959.” Roberts had argued Heritage doesn’t cancel people. Rector reminded him otherwise: “Did we cancel David Duke? Yes…. Did we cancel the John Birch Society? Yes.”
Amy Swearer, senior legal fellow, unloaded. Heritage could have “led from the front and lovingly rebuked our ally,” she said. “Loving rebuke is an action that respectfully even Helen Keller could see is not the same thing as participating in cancel culture.” Instead? Heritage “managed to scrape together an initial response that at best was equal parts incoherent, unhelpful, and naive.” The days that followed were worse: “You appeared to dodge, duck, dip, dive, and dodge any real semblance of accountability.” She noted that Roberts only apologized “after it became clear that Ryan [Neuhaus] falling on his sword would be insufficient to quell the outrage, both inside and outside of this building.” Her verdict: “a master class in cowardice.”
Rachel Greszler, senior research fellow, broadened the critique: “Policy positions are increasingly being decided in closed-door meetings among a few elite people… often in utter disregard to the policy experts themselves and to decades of longstanding Heritage positions.” The Carlson video was “the final straw” — “It’s just the last one, but there are many that have come before it.” Then she looked at Roberts directly: “Kevin, you are winsome and you have always been kind to me, but I do not believe that you are the right person to lead the Heritage Foundation.”
Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow, laid out the damage: “If the Heritage Foundation and you do not dump Tucker Carlson publicly, we are not going to repair that damage.” He warned Roberts about confusing personal and institutional loyalties: “If you’re out there speaking, if you’re saying, this person’s a personal friend of mine, everybody out there is going to say, oh, that’s a friend of Heritage. Heritage supports them… If you think you can make that distinguishing publicly, that’s a huge mistake.”
Daniel Fleischer of the Allison Center on US-Israel relations spoke with visible frustration: “We are six days into this and there’s been no leadership on it. Tucker’s an antisemite. And we, as Heritage, do not want to associate with him. And we still do not have a statement about that.”
Project Esther Collapses
Project Esther launched in October 2024 as a conservative “National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism.” Critics noted the initiative focused almost entirely on left-wing antisemitism, labeling pro-Palestinian activism a “Hamas Support Network” while ignoring the right-wing variety. Major Jewish organizations wouldn’t sign on. Roberts’ defense of Carlson cracked the whole thing open.
By then, Roberts had made Heritage the command center of Project 2025, which the Trump administration is implementing across federal agencies. His policy influence had never been greater. But the Project’s Christian nationalist framework, which positions conservative Christianity as the organizing principle of American governance, had always been more comfortable confronting antisemitism on the left than in its own ranks.
After October 30th, the coalition disintegrated. Young Jewish Conservatives resigned from the task force. The Zionist Organization of America withdrew its partnership. On live television during a Newsmax interview, Yaakov Menken of the Coalition for Jewish Values resigned after his organization withdrew. Israel Forever Foundation CEO Elana Yael Heideman cited Heritage’s “shameful support of Nick Fuentes’ horrific commentary.” Lori Lowenthal Marcus of The Deborah Project resigned from all Heritage affiliations: “The edifice of Heritage is no longer one which I can trust.” The Jewish Leadership Project demanded a “vigorous explanation” and that Heritage “disconnect from Carlson immediately.” David Bernstein of the North American Values Institute resigned, calling Roberts’ “venomous coalition” phrase an attack on “me and any Jewish person who cares about condemning antisemitism.” The Combat Antisemitism Movement severed ties. At least a dozen more followed.
On November 7th, the task force itself cut ties with Heritage. The four co-chairs — Mario Bramnick, Victoria Coates, Ellie Cohanim, and Luke Moon — announced they’d continue their work “outside the Heritage Foundation for a season.” Their statement: “We cannot allow the Conservative movement to be corrupted and destroyed by those consumed with attacking America’s Judeo-Christian heritage and values.”
The Impasse
The individual departures kept coming.
Adam Mossoff taught law at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School. He’d been a Heritage visiting fellow. He waited two weeks before submitting his resignation — he wanted to be sure, he wrote, that his decision was well thought-out, writing to Roberts, “you falsely conflate here the struggle sessions and cancellation campaigns that the woke left inflict on their apostates and heretics with the proper and steadfast moral condemnation of nihilism, collectivism, Nazism, and Jew hatred.”
Christopher DeMuth, a distinguished fellow and former president of the American Enterprise Institute, quit. Stephen Moore, the economist, quit.
Michele Bachmann, former congresswoman and antisemitism task force member, went on Newsmax: “I resigned from the Heritage antisemitism task force because Heritage leadership failed to stand against the voices of antisemitism on the political right. Inexplicably, consistent voices of antisemitism on the political right were embraced and, worse, defended by the leadership of Heritage Foundation.” Her assessment of the damage: “This is the biggest PR disaster in Heritage’s history. Heritage leadership shot a cannon through their brand.”
The heaviest blow landed on November 18th. Robert P. George is a Princeton professor, one of the most respected conservative intellectuals in America. He served on Heritage’s Board of Trustees. He’d tried to negotiate something behind the scenes — a full retraction, a clean break. It didn’t work.
“I could not remain without a full retraction of the video released by Kevin Roberts, speaking for and in the name of Heritage, on October 30th,” George wrote. “Although Kevin publicly apologized for some of what he said in the video, he could not offer a full retraction of its content. So, we reached an impasse.”
His post on X drew 1.9 million views: “I believe that the conservative movement, though it can and should be a broad tent, simply cannot include or accommodate white supremacists or racists of any type, antisemites, eugenicists, or others whose ideologies are incompatible with belief in the inherent and equal dignity of all. As a conservative, I say that there is no place for such people in our movement.”
“An Undeclared Civil War”
The Wall Street Journal editorial board — usually friendly territory for Heritage — ran a piece called “The New Right’s New Antisemites.” Roberts’ “strategic silences and moral evasions,” they wrote, threatened “the moral standing of the American right itself.” His deference to Carlson had let someone who “launders Jew-loathing to the mainstream” escape accountability.
Republican senators ran the other direction. Ted Cruz — who’s tangled with Carlson before — told the Republican Jewish Coalition gathering: “In the last six months, I’ve seen more antisemitism on the right than I have in my entire life. This is a poison, and I believe we are facing an existential crisis in our party and in our country. Now is the time for choosing, now is the time for courage. If you sit there with someone who says Adolf Hitler was very, very cool and their mission is to combat and defeat ‘global Jewry,’ and you say nothing, then you are a coward, and you are complicit in that evil.”
Matt Brooks, the RJC’s CEO, told Jewish Insider he was “appalled, offended and disgusted that he and Heritage would stand with Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes.” At the RJC summit, he named what was happening: “We are at this point in what I consider sort of the early stages of an undeclared civil war within the Republican Party, as it relates to Israel, and antisemitism and the Jewish community. And it’s really going to be our challenge going forward to combat that before it has a chance to grow and metastasize in the Republican Party.” College students at the conference waved red signs: “Tucker is not MAGA.”
Joel Griffith, a Heritage alum, called on donors to speak up: “Kevin Roberts does not speak for me as a Heritage alum, nor does he represent the views of many allies of Israel who remain on staff at Heritage.”
The money started drying up. One major donor told CNN: “I’m waiting to see how things play out, but if Kevin remains as president, we will not be giving to Heritage.”
“Always”
Roberts tried to claw back the narrative. He released another video: “Everyone has the responsibility to speak up against the scourge of antisemitism, no matter the messenger. Heritage and I will do so, even when my friend Tucker Carlson needs challenging.”
But he wouldn’t fully retract the October 30th video. Wouldn’t disavow his friendship with Carlson. Wouldn’t delete it. He kept saying Carlson would “always” be a close friend of Heritage.
Heritage’s chief advancement officer, Andy Olivastro, defended Roberts as a man under attack for “his unwavering fight to save our Republic.” Leakers were threatened with firing. The Board of Trustees — 13 members, including Rebekah Mercer, Barb Van Andel-Gaby, and Michael W. Gleba — said nothing. No statement backing Roberts. No move to remove him. Just silence while he collects $926,195 a year and Heritage sits on $335 million in assets.
“You’re Done. You’re Dead.”
Two weeks after the staff meeting, Tucker Carlson sat for an interview with 1819 News and delivered Roberts’ eulogy.
“I thought that he could steer it into a positive direction,” Carlson said. “He tried. And in the end, 10 days ago, he was completely destroyed.” On Heritage’s future: “They’re smart people there. They have a ton of money. They should be a force for good. But I don’t see how they ever will be.”
Then came the knife: “He was weak. He decided he wanted his job more than to tell the truth. He reached the end of his ability to withstand the terror and the punishment, and he gives in,” Carlson said. “But unfortunately, when you do give in, you’re done. You’re dead in a way.”
When reporters asked President Trump about Carlson interviewing a Holocaust denier, he shrugged: “You can’t tell him who to interview. If he wants to interview Nick Fuentes — I don’t know much about him — but if he wants to do it, get the word out. People have to decide.”
Robert P. George already did. So did dozens of Heritage fellows, task force members, and board trustees. So did Republican senators at the Republican Jewish Coalition summit, waving signs reading “Tucker is not MAGA.” So did evangelical donors who stopped writing checks.
They decided that William F. Buckley was right in 1962: you expel the antisemites and the lunatics, or they expel you. Heritage chose otherwise. The house that Reagan built is burning, and Kevin Roberts is the one who struck the match — defending an interview he never watched, for a friend he wouldn’t abandon, in a movement that’s deciding whether it still has boundaries at all.
