The Social World

Tag: Heritage Foundation

  • Is MAGA cracking up?

    Is MAGA cracking up?

    In the year since his triumphant reelection, Donald Trump has racked up an enormous list of accomplishments, both foreign and domestic. His sweeping, “move fast and break things” approach to governance has generated a form of accepted normalcy which his first administration never experienced.

    His White House staff and cabinet, once full of leaks and disloyalty, has turned out to be incredibly faithful. On the international scene, he has credibly been suggested as deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize. And at home, according to polling averages from RealClearPolitics, Trump is more popular at this point in his second term than either George W. Bush or Barack Obama was.

    Yet within the movement that made all this possible, it seems everyone is at each other’s throats. The long knives are out for people not on the left, but inside the big tent that Trump built. It’s not just a hierarchical fight between social and fiscal conservatives, insiders vs outsiders. It’s MAHA moms and tech giants; tariff lovers and haters; the Wall Street Journal vs the Heritage Foundation; Candace Owens vs Turning Point USA; Megyn Kelly vs based icon Sydney Sweeney; comic Dave Smith vs the Babylon Bee; Ben Shapiro vs Tucker Carlson; and Tucker vs, well, pretty much everyone on Fox News and most people who aren’t. It’s the most vicious, catty, well-coiffed and fully botoxed melee since Anchorman, and no one knows where Marjorie Taylor Greene found that hand grenade.

    The question on the mind of every Republican in Washington: are we witnessing the great MAGA crack-up? And the answer is: almost certainly yes.

    The insiders always knew it was too good to last. Trump’s remarkable political skill is in identifying the one issue that cuts across natural partisan tendencies to create a coalition that seemed incompatible. He won over the broad ethnic working-class coalition that supported him in 2024. He also scooped up the votes of those who wanted crackdowns on crime and those who want nonviolent offenders freed, of drug legalizers and vaccine skeptics, pro-natalists and crypto bros, supply siders and trade hawks, pastors and porn stars.

    “Trump is so unique of a political figure, when he’s focused on governing, it’s actually time that daddy is spending away from the kids,” says one longtime GOP insider. “He brings back gifts whenever he comes back from one of his trips, but while he’s away at work or just not paying attention to us, we scrap like cats and dogs and start every day with bruises on our shins.”

    The fights often take place on X – the site where everything is happening, which for many on the right these days seems to make everything about Israel, all the time. Ongoing squabbles can become so internecine as to be more difficult to follow than the plots of prestige TV shows. The strife is often colored by personal relationships: former employees feuding with past bosses or personnel fights with gripes held over from the first Trump term, or the different responses to January 6. This stretches all the way up to the President himself, who refused to endorse his former critic, Virginia Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears, in the state’s recent gubernatorial race. It might not have made a difference, given her double-digit failure at the polls. But it was still a reminder that old wounds linger.

    On the surface, the MAGA cohort should be enormously pleased with how things are going, even despite the Democratic success in the off-year elections. Yet rumbling underneath, multiple asymmetric fights are being waged, all of which can be viewed through the lens of who is up or down in controlling and directing the next generation of MAGA. Typically, conflicts of this nature are based on which ideological faction supports whom as the next presidential candidate. But in the case of the current fracas, such lines are often unclear. With even Marco Rubio reportedly acknowledging that J.D. Vance is the frontrunner for the 2028 Republican nomination, there isn’t really a competing candidate coalescing support for an uphill run… yet.

    The Heritage Foundation’s struggles in this moment are a microcosm of the crackup’s tangled motivations. The story goes like this: in the aftermath of the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk in September, a violent moment that both unified and depressed the coalition of the right, various figures began to position themselves to inherit all – or a portion – of Kirk’s role as the titular leader of the younger MAGA base.

    It quickly became clear that this was about more than just reaching right-leaning college students and that it actually reflected competing visions about both Kirk’s and Turning Point’s attitudes toward Israel and anti-Semitism. Fights and arguments conducted via text messages and DMs spilled out into the open, with some conspiratorially minded figures claiming (without any evidence) that Kirk was actually assassinated over his shifting views on the subject. No personality exploited this moment more than Carlson, whose appearance as a speaker at Kirk’s memorial event included him comparing the young activist’s murder to the death of Jesus Christ. He invited the audience to “picture the scene in a lamp-lit room with a bunch of guys sitting around eating hummus,” painting the hummus-eaters as the ones who engineered the crucifixion. As he typically does, Carlson pretended the suggestion of anything untoward about his anecdote was ridiculous. But afterwards he brought a longtime Kirk antagonist, the aggressively misogynist and racist troll Nick Fuentes, onto his show for what essentially amounted to a softball promotional interview.

    The interview broke something open. Conservatives already uncomfortable with Carlson’s pro-Russia and Qatar-spinning tendencies turned on him. This turned explosive when the leadership of Heritage, the central think tank for American conservatism and the creator of the Project 2025 agenda that has guided much of Trump’s second term, decided to weigh in on Carlson’s side. Heritage president Kevin Roberts released a video defending the broadcaster, claiming that “we will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda,” and that “conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class or from their mouthpieces in Washington.” He denounced Carlson’s critics as a “venomous coalition” and suggested that criticism of the Fuentes interview amounted to an attempt at cancellation.

    The statement prompted widespread condemnation. Texas Senator Ted Cruz denounced it, conservative publications and op-ed pages decried it, long-tenured scholars resigned from the think tank, Heritage’s dedicated committee to tackle anti-Semitism considered assigning staffers to observe Shabbat. Ultimately, Roberts’s chief of staff took the fall and left his post. Roberts himself was compelled to hold a lengthy apology session. In the face of calls for his resignation, he held on to his position with the mantra: “I made the mess; let me clean it up.”

    At that session, a young female staffer provided a view of why that “mess” happened in the first place, standing up to say: “I condemn Nick Fuentes’s hateful rhetoric. That being said, I would like to point out that some of the most vocal people against Tucker Carlson have been calling him an anti-Semite since he started to hold more anti-interventionalist views. A handful of young colleagues and I had no issue with the points you made in the original video… Gen Z has an increasingly unfavorable view of Israel – and it’s not because millions of Americans are anti-Semitic. It’s because we are Catholic and Orthodox and believe that Christian Zionism is a modern heresy… as a young person, many of us are generally tired of foreign entanglements, while our problems in this country worsen.”

    While the old guard GOP might like it to be otherwise, the young staffer speaks for a growing number of solid MAGA voters who have become frustrated with the state of things. In a cycle when Democrats are embracing a political message emphasizing “affordability” and Trump seems to be spending outsized time on legacy-building projects instead of addressing the problems of inflation and growth, even some of his most loyal supporters are beginning to sound like critics. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Representative who became the first Republican to call Israel’s actions in Gaza “genocide,” has become the recipient of a dramatic degree of strange new respect from everyone from Wolf Blitzer to Bill Maher to the harridans of The View. Her message is essentially that America’s leaders are spending too much time looking at other people’s problems and need to get back to focusing on their own. The critique is clearly aimed at Trump and those around him: the Donald’s focus has been decidedly more international in recent months.

    It’s hard not to see this as sour grapes from supporters who expected a different Trump 2.0 than they are getting. As author James Kirchick summarized in the Washington Post: “Though Trump campaigned as an isolationist, he has certainly not governed as one. He has recently pulled a U-turn on Ukraine, imposing fresh sanctions on Moscow and calling off a proposed summit with Putin in Budapest. Trump is also ramping up action against Venezuela, citing dubious legal pretext to launch airstrikes against alleged drug boats in the Caribbean Sea and amassing military assets off the country’s coast for a possible attack on the mainland. And with Operation Midnight Hammer, he joined the Israeli assault on Iran’s nuclear program. Even in symbolic ways, like changing the Defense Department’s name to the War Department, Trump has taken American foreign policy in a more interventionist, even bellicose direction.”

    When Trump was making the decision to attack Iran in the summer and Carlson intoned, publicly, that such a strike would be likely to spark World War Three, the President responded by noting that he alone decides what “America First” means. The central question for the MAGA coalition is now who, once Trump is no longer behind the Resolute Desk, gets to decide what America First means?

    For Vance, the man who seems likeliest to inherit that role, there seems to be recognition that things aren’t headed in the right direction. “We need to focus on the home front,” the Vice-President tweeted in response to the electoral drubbing the Republican party received earlier this month. “The infighting is stupid. I care about my fellow citizens – particularly young Americans – being able to afford a decent life, I care about immigration and our sovereignty and I care about establishing peace overseas so our resources can be focused at home. If you care about those things too, let’s work together.”

    Whether Vance can hold things together through this moment of crack-up could determine whether this coalition, forged originally by Trump’s political ingenuity and force of will, can endure beyond the man himself.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

  • The bonfire of the New Right’s vanities

    The bonfire of the New Right’s vanities

    The American right has a problem: it can’t stop talking about itself. Commentators, academics and journalists of what used to be called a “conservative” persuasion all tend to think that their ideas are tremendously interesting. And, in the way a difficult child becomes argumentative when he or she isn’t getting attention, they fight. They fear irrelevance and so they fall out with each other and take sides in order to prove to themselves that they have something worth saying. Things become messy and nasty and everybody gets carried away – usually in the hope of grabbing their own slice of an all-too easily distracted online audience. (Why else am I writing this?)

    Today we see the quarrelsome tendency of the so-called “New Right” at work in the squabbles over Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, Kevin Roberts, Nick Fuentes and whether it’s OK to praise Hitler.

    But we also saw it six years ago, in the so-famous-it’s-now-largely-forgotten debate between David French and Sohrab Ahmari in 2019. This was a curious clash between two highly intelligent men which took place in the months before a global pandemic shook the world. The French vs Ahmari argument was over big ideas: the First Amendment and the culture wars, jurisprudence and liberty, the free market and nationalism, technocracy, Catholicism and family values. The title of the actual debate, hosted at the Catholic University of America and moderated by the New York Times’s Ross Douthat, was “What is Integralism now?” (Put that question in your Chestertonian pipe and smoke it, you beta cuck.)

    It was also about manners. Should conservatives keep upholding the importance of civility and lose? Or be as vicious as the left and win? Ahmari, representing the emergent “post-liberal” consensus, was on Team Rude. There could be “no polite, David French-ian third way around the cultural civil war,” he said. “The only way is through.” And at the time that seemed to be a clinching argument. French, a NeverTrumper, represented the tired and failed politics of the George W. Bush era. Few wanted to hear his equivocations when #MeToo was still empowering a particularly virulent form of feminism and controversies over “drag-queen story hour” were being were lost.

    But, boy oh boy, what a boreathon did Sohrab cause! For weeks, right-of-center pundits continued to weigh in on whether they were Frenchist or Ahmarite. Most commentators waffled out a third-way of saying there is no third-way: French was wrong, yes, but conservatives should not necessarily embrace the Jacobite tendencies of the MAGA fringe. Ergo, facto, propter, hoc.

    Then came 2020 – Covid, Black Lives Matter, peak woke, a contested election – and conservatives became increasingly radical. The left really was evil and needed to be smashed. Right-wingers started talking confidently about a “reverse march through in the institutions.” By the time of Trump’s reelection last year, and in the dizzying first months of his second administration, the New Right’s triumph seemed complete. J.D. Vance, who espoused the “paleo” or “post-liberal” worldview so eloquently, became Vice President. From day one, the Trump-Vance administration went to war with DEI and Harvard and anybody else who stood in the way. And on Liberation Day, Trump ignored the bleating of the free marketeers and upended the global financial status quo in favour of protection.

    But the David Frenches of this world never quite went away. They merely licked their wounds. And now, amid the agonized infighting over Tucker Carlson’s decision to interview the Groyper-in-Chief Nick Fuentes, they are attempting to exact their oh-so-civilized revenge.

    At the think-tanks, with all those nervous donors, the knives are out. Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, at first defended Carlson. Then, under pressure, he performed a spectacular reverse-ferret and groveled.

    On Friday, Christopher Long and Thomas Lynch, the former president and chairman of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, resigned from the board in disgust at what they called the “post-liberal hijacking” of their influential non-profit. In an “Open Letter to the Conservative Movement,” Long and Lynch denounced ISI’s current president, Johnny Burtka, for his “no enemies to the right” leadership, for indulging the “media crank Tucker Carlson,” the “postliberal icon Patrick Deneen,” the “neoreactionary Curtis Yarvin” and “others who seek to undermine the liberal ideas of the American Founding.” They denounced ISI’s Project Cosmos podcast for pandering to the “Yarvin-Fuentes-Carlson echo chamber”.

    What Long and Lynch conveniently ignored is that Nick Fuentes in fact loathes Curtis Yarvin, whom he regards as a sort of controlled-opposition agent for organized Jewry. But who cares about logic when you’ve decided that you are defending America’s founding?

    David French isn’t failing to seize the moment. “Once you’ve demolished respect for liberal democracy and demolished real value in rectitude and character in public life, it’s a short trip nihilism and fascism,” he declared on X, displaying something of a Cassandra complex.

    Again, several barrages of other conservative media voices have taken to social media to clarify the position of their own bright minds in this celestial constellation of 21st century intellectualism. “No, the post-liberals aren’t solely responsible for the Groyper moment,” intoned the former National Review columnist Jonah Goldberg. “But the claim that they didn’t help… to get us to this point is such obvious contrafactual nonsense.”

    In reply, various new-right influencers, who’ve been carefully building their large and “based” audiences for a long time, have taken to bemoaning all the fractiousness while pining for that recently lost voice of reason, the murder victim Charlie Kirk. As the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh put it, “everything that’s happened over the past two months has signalled to the left that assassinations work. Take out one of our leaders ands we’ll start eating each other.”

    As ever in American conservatism, there’s masses of grandstanding and sentimentality covering over the more instinctive vanity and self-preservation. It’s exhausting. I love American conservatives, and it’s a sign of a vigorous culture, I suppose, to treat ideas and principles as worth fighting for. But is it really necessary for everyone to take themselves so seriously? Surely the most conservative insight of all came from that limey Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, who said: “Nothing matters very much and few things matter at all.”

  • Can you be ‘more MAGA’ than Trump?

    Can you be ‘more MAGA’ than Trump?

    The MAGA crack-up has been the talk of the town this week – thanks to a squishy answer from President Trump on H-1B visas in a Fox News interview, the looming release of all the Epstein documents the House has access to, disagreements over what America’s relationship with Israel should be… and the lingering hangover of the Heritage Foundation’s Tucker Carlson quarrel. (Conveniently, the forthcoming US issue of The Spectator tackles this topic – you can read two pieces from the cover package, by Freddy Gray and Ben Domenech, now.)

    These disputes – about whether there’s such a thing as being “more MAGA than Trump” – are trickling out beyond Washington and into the 2026 primary races. A tipster pointed Cockburn toward two fundraising events over the coming days that illustrate the divide, for the US Senate contest in South Carolina.

    First, the glitzy “Trump Graham Majority Fund Luncheon,” which takes place tomorrow in West Palm Beach. President Trump will make remarks in favor of the incumbent Senator Lindsey Graham – with tickets at an eye-watering $50,000 per person. (The contact for the event is Lisa Spies, whose husband Charlie briefly served as RNC chief counsel in 2024 and had a lengthier tenure working for Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign.)

    Closer to home, there’s a happy hour at Butterworth’s on Monday to raise funds for Paul Dans’s challenge to Graham. Tickets range from a far more modest $50 to $2,500. Dans, readers may recall, served as the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 director, leading the initiative from 2022 until 2024. He took the fall after the Trump campaign distanced itself from Project 2025, as its hardline social conservatism offered Team Biden-Harris a convenient foil.

    Speaking of Heritage, rumors are once again swirling about a looming trustee meeting next week to resolve the think tank’s recent woes. But a spokesman assures Cockburn: “There is no board meeting scheduled for next week.”

    You don’t know Dick

    Today marks the tenth day since former vice president Dick Cheney’s passing. Flags around the country are flying at half-staff (in accordance with an Eisenhower-era executive order) – but aside from that, reactions to Cheney’s death have been quite muted in Trump’s Washington.

    The President has not issued a statement about Cheney – or a Truth Social post, for that matter. Compare that to when President Jimmy Carter died 11 months ago, when Trump made two tributes on Truth Social. Cheney’s funeral will take place at the Washington National Cathedral next Thursday – but it is not clear whether President Trump plans to attend, let alone speak. He is not on the Cathedral’s announced list of speakers. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

    On our radar

    DINESH IS SERVED Dinesh D’Souza, author of The End of Racism, has come under fire for his post speculating that Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy could “fix education” for white kids, while “all the professional whiteys on X continue their idle boasting.”

    SWAL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL? Representative Eric Swalwell has been referred to the Department of Justice by the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency following allegations of mortgage and tax fraud.

    GAETZ RATES A troubling report in the New York Times details how the 17-year-old girl who was the subject of a Justice Department sex-trafficking probe and House Ethics Committee investigation into former congressman Matt Gaetz was homeless and had joined a sugar-baby website, while underage, to get money for braces. Gaetz said, “I never had sex with this person.”

    Rock robot rock

    Last August, a group of Silicon Valley power-players, including unofficial Trump advisors Marc Andreessen and Joe Lonsdale, the cofounder of Palantir, launched a super PAC called “Leading the Future” to back AI friendly candidates. The White House is “irked” about this, according to NBC News, because one of the PAC leaders is a former staffer for Chuck Schumer. The White House is usually irked about something, but a staffer, speaking on the record, finds this unusually irksome.

    “Any group run by Schumer acolytes will not have the blessing of the President or his team,” said the official. “Any donors or supporters of this group should think twice about getting on the wrong side of Trumpworld.”

    But perhaps a nonpartisan approach makes sense. The computers that are about to run society care not whether you’re blue or red, donkey or elephant. Such petty mammalian concerns are beneath them. Our Silicon Valley betters established Leading the Future to grease the skids for AI’s arrival, not to play puerile partisan games. Sitting around talking about a “slap in the face” because some foolish person once worked for a political rival is pointless. AI is here to lead the future, not to be borne back ceaselessly into the past. Cockburn, for one, welcomes our new robot overlords.

    Weigh-in at the border

    Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a “cable” last week instructing US diplomats to consider obesity as a reason to reject foreign visa applications. The cable is an unholy fusion of MAGA nationalism and MAHA weight concerns.

    Obesity, the cable correctly states, leads to all sorts of terrible health problems, which can be a drain on America’s national resources. These would better spent, apparently, on rounding up obese people and sending them back to their country of origin. “Self-sufficiency has been a longstanding principle of U.S. immigration policy,” the cable says, “and the public charge ground of inadmissibility has been a part of our immigration law for more than 100 years.”

    It’s unlikely that immigration officials were turning away obese people at Ellis Island. People used to arrive in this country lean, hungry and ready to push a pickle cart on the Lower East Side. Cockburn nonetheless observes that obesity tends to be more of a problem for people after they arrive in the United States, not before, as they discover the magical qualities of the Sonic value menu. But it’s clear that the State Department has now adopted an immigration policy based on signs that have hung in American frat houses for decades: no fat chicks.

    Subscribe to Cockburn’s Diary on Substack to get it in your inbox on Tuesdays and Fridays.

  • The attack on the Heritage Foundation is an attack on MAGA

    It’s Thursday morning as I write. Has The Wall Street Journal weighed in with another attack on Kevin Roberts yet, the besieged president of the Heritage Foundation? No? Be patient. It’s early hours yet. Another fusillade is due any minute. 

    I have written about that tempest-in-a-teapot myself. I agree that Roberts’s brief video statement defending the Heritage Foundation’s friendship with Tucker Carlson was ill-advised. I say why in that column. I also think that his efforts at damage control have been ineffective. But given the incontinent fury of the response to that two-minute and thirty-nine-second video, I am not sure that anyone could have calmed the storm.  

    The more the mob rages, however, the more I suspect that – to adapt a famous saying of Saul Alinsky– the issue is not the issue. It’s not really Tucker Carlson and his curious ideas about chem trails, Area 51, the baddies in World II, or the state of Israel. It’s not even Nick Fuentes, the hectoring twenty-seven-year-old anti-Semite and political performance artist whom Carlson recently treated to a long and pillow-plump interview.  

    The key that unlocks the agenda in this controversy is contained in the phrase “proxy war.” The prime targets are not Kevin Roberts or Tucker Carlson.  They are expendable cutouts for the real villain, the Make America Great Agenda of Donald Trump.  

    This is something that John Daniel Davidson touches on in a recent column in The Federalist. “Genuine concern about anti-Semitism on the right is being hijacked by neocons to attack J.D. Vance in hopes of retaking control of the GOP.”

    Oh, for the days of George Bush and Mitt Romney! Can we get them back?  Only a few days ago, it was reported that Mike Pence is tanned, rested, and ready for 2028. 

    We can draw a veil over that particular farce. Rest assured, Mike Pence will not be moralizing from the White House. But what entities like The Wall Street Journal long for is a return to a Pence-like “normality” and “Conservative, Inc.” The deep state missed taking down Trump when he ran in 2016. He was supposed to be toast, but somehow he prevailed. Then the Russia Collusion delusion was supposed to destroy him but failed. Then, when the 2024 election lumbered into sight, the establishment thought it had mounted a devastating first strike against Trump and his populist agenda. Jack Smith, Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, Fanny Willis, ninety-something indictments partisan judges and lawfare as far as the eye could see. Amazingly, it didn’t work.

    Now those forces are piggy-backing on the campaign against anti-Semitism to take more shots against MAGA. The ironies abound.  For one thing, when it comes to anti-Semitism, the Heritage Foundation under Kevin Roberts has been close to a model citizen. You haven’t heard that in the many attacks on Roberts, but it is true. The case was well put by Victoria Coates, a Heritage scholar and national security expert, in a letter the WSJ deigned to publish on November 6 under the title “Heritage Always Stands Against Anti-Semitism.”  

    The prime targets are not Kevin Roberts or Tucker Carlson.  They are expendable cutouts for the real villain, the Make America Great Agenda of Donald Trump.  

    “In the days after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel,” Coates notes, “Heritage hosted one of the first public events to condemn the terrorism and the blatant anti-Semitism it unleashed.”

    “Shortly thereafter we created the National Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism to help coordinate the efforts of like-minded organizations.

    In October 2024, we launched Project Esther, an initiative to combat anti-Semitism in the U.S. through legal and legislative remedies. This effort has found allies across the political spectrum and raised awareness among the general public and the Trump administration of the immediate threat that left-wing anti-Semitism poses to America’s Jews and the US… The Davis Institute for National Security, which I lead, focuses on defeating antisemitism, as do our colleagues in the domestic-policy and legal departments.”

    Coates, I should add, is the author of The Battle for the Jewish State: How Israel and America Can Win, which I recently published at Encounter Books.  

    There is a certain grubby pleasure in identifying a candidate for ostracism and then joining the crowd in shouting an approved list of imprecations. This is especially true when an adjacent issue provides moral cover, as the charge of antisemitism does here. 

    Hannah Arendt noted in The Origins of Totalitarianism, the growth of anti-Semitism in a society is always a bad sign, a canary in the mine of social and political comity. The oddity in this case is that Kevin Roberts, far from approving or abetting anti-Semitism, has been exemplary in attacking it. 

  • The Heritage Foundation’s exodus of experts

    The Heritage Foundation’s exodus of experts

    Under Kevin D. Roberts, the Heritage Foundation is unraveling the remarkable legacy Edwin Feulner built. Once known as “the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement,” Heritage’s moral and philosophical clarity has yielded to confusion, populism and personality-driven politics. The damage to Heritage’s mission and credibility is becoming irreparable.

    Much of the recent outcry focuses on Roberts’s decision to maintain Heritage’s partnership with Tucker Carlson after Carlson’s now-infamous interview with Holocaust-denier Nick Fuentes. During that exchange, Carlson ridiculed Christians who affirm the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland, sneering that figures such as Ambassador Mike Huckabee and Senator Ted Cruz were “seized by this brain virus.” He derided Christian Zionism as “heresy” and declared, “I dislike them more than anybody.” Carlson even proposed stripping US citizenship from young Americans serving in the Israel Defense Forces.

    The record is long and damning. In March 2025, Carlson hosted Qatar’s prime minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, who defended his regime’s financial support for Hamas as a “mediation tool.” Carlson offered virtually no challenge. In February 2024, he traveled to Moscow to interview Vladimir Putin, allowing the Russian dictator to justify his invasion of Ukraine as a response to NATO expansion and to describe Ukraine as “an artificial state.” Carlson listened approvingly. In July 2025, he sat down with Iran’s president Masoud Pezeshkian, who denied nuclear ambitions and whitewashed his regime’s repression.Rather than condemn Carlson’s antisemitic tirades, Roberts chose to defend him – blaming “the globalist class” and “their mouthpieces in Washington” for supposedly forcing conservatives to “reflexively support” Israel. He dismissed those alarmed by Carlson’s anti-Semitic rhetoric as part of a “venomous coalition.” This is not an isolated misstep. For years, Roberts has aligned Heritage with Carlson even as the broadcaster has platformed dictators, historical revisionists and antisemites hostile to American interests and values.

    Equally revealing is Roberts’s claim that he doesn’t keep up with Carlson’s content because of his sports-viewing habits – as if ignorance excused negligence. A CEO who neglected developments in his own industry would be dismissed. The Heritage board’s duty of care requires ensuring that its president is informed and aligned with the organization’s founding principles.

    This builds on other troubling decisions by Roberts threatening the reputation of the institution. Its sprawling “Project 2025” document places pro-market and interventionist ideas side by side, creating ideological confusion rather than clarity. Even more troubling, Roberts has weaponized Heritage’s “one-voice” policy to pressure fellows to remove social-media posts defending capitalism or criticizing unconstitutional executive overreach. In doing so, he has effectively “canceled” Heritage’s own scholars.

    Under Roberts, Heritage has abandoned much of the philosophical fusionism that once defined modern conservatism: the Reagan-era synthesis of free markets, social conservatism and a strong national defense. Roberts’s Heritage now flirts with tariffs, industrial policy and even capital controls – positions antithetical to economic freedom. He condemned tariff critics as “globalist elites” and celebrated Trump-era protectionism as a “tool of statecraft.” That is a sharp break from the tradition that rightfully regards economic liberty as inseparable from political liberty. Roberts threatens to replace Reagan conservatism with Buchanan’s nativism, protectionism, isolationism and central planning.

    The exodus of respected experts on free trade, financial regulation and macroeconomics, international relations and first principles speaks volumes. Their departures symbolize not only a collapse of institutional expertise but the silencing of the intellectual backbone that once made Heritage formidable. Meanwhile, Kevin Roberts hired Mario Enzler, who was forced to resign as Dean of the St. Augustine Business School after the university became aware of multiple falsified academic degrees. Roberts also hired Mark Meador, a critic of both the “consumer-welfare” antitrust standard and the esteemed Judge Robert Bork who championed it.

    Roberts proudly claims he “does not take direction from members or donors.” In the corporate world, a CEO with such arrogance would face swift action from the board and shareholders. Roberts’ alliances and rhetoric have damaged Heritage’s reputation and alienated its donor base. He is using Heritage as a personal platform for ideological experimentation and personal self-aggrandizement.

    Donors have entrusted Heritage with hundreds of millions of dollars, often through endowments meant to safeguard Western civilization and the US-Israel alliance. Those intentions deserve respect, not betrayal.

    A continued institutional alliance between Heritage and Tucker Carlson normalizes the antisemitism promoted weekly on Tucker’s show. It’s for this reason leading members of the National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism (NTFCA) publicly announced their departures from this Heritage project including Combat Antisemitism Movement, Young Jewish Conservatives, Coalition of Jewish Values, ZOA and the Israel Innovation Fund. The loss of the organization’s moral and intellectual capital under Kevin Roberts is increasingly clear.

    The Heritage Foundation once stood as a bulwark of principled conservatism by confronting Soviet tyranny, championing tax reform and deregulation, and defending the Judeo-Christian roots of Western civilization. Today, Kevin Roberts aligns Heritage with a demagogue who flatters dictators and scorns allies, and he muzzles Heritage fellows from speaking out. In so doing, Roberts is dismantling not just a think tank’s reputation but a generation’s work of conservative institution building.


  • Trump, tariffs and IQ: the feud inside the Heritage Foundation

    Trump, tariffs and IQ: the feud inside the Heritage Foundation

    The transfer from wonk-world to the White House is usually cause for celebration – a bragging opportunity for the think tank that just got their guy or gal into the administration. Yet the nomination of E.J. Antoni, chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, to run the Bureau of Labor Statistics has been met with a rather quiet response from lots of his colleagues on Massachusetts Avenue.

    Cockburn noticed the crickets. Why isn’t Heritage pushing the appointment more, and leaving Team Trump to do most of the work (there is, indeed, some convincing to do)?

    Cockburn understands one event last year has made some staff hesitant to publicly endorse Antoni: a presentation delivered by Antoni to Heritage interns last summer was sidetracked when he was asked a question about IQ. Antoni argued that women were clustered around average intelligence, while more men were likely to be hyper-intelligent or below-average intelligence. After some complaints about the presentation, Heritage VP of domestic policy Roger Severino told the interns that this was not Heritage’s formal policy position.

    Commenting on Antoni’s presentation last year, Mary Vought, vice president of strategic communications at the Heritage Foundation, said: “The women at Heritage – including several members of senior management – are some of the best and brightest in the country. It may be hard for leftist outlets to understand, but we respect the women at Heritage enough to know that they can have candid conversations about statistics.”

    Heritage also provided comment from Mary Heipel, who took part in the Heritage Summer 2024 Young Leaders Program: “The efforts by the left and legacy media to smear an economist for presenting a statistic are, ultimately, a barely disguised attempt to attack the President, alongside an internship program at Heritage that has helped foster the careers of thousands of women.”

    Antoni’s presentation is just one example of the current tensions within the 52-year-old institution. Cockburn understands there is a growing divide between the classical liberals, who have traditionally defined the think tank’s direction, and what is seen by some staff to be a move towards a Trumpian worldview under Heritage president Dr. Kevin D. Roberts.

    It has not gone unnoticed in wonk-land just how many senior economists and policy experts have left Heritage since Roberts took up leadership in 2021. The list includes David Ditch (now senior analyst at the Economic Policy Innovation Center); Joel Griffith (now senior fellow at Advancing American Freedom); Parker Sheppard (now senior fellow at the Fiscal Lab on Capitol Hill); and Tori Smith (now senior vice president at Forbes Tate Partners).

    Griffith, who left Heritage last December, told The Spectator: “There was an environmental shift. It wasn’t just a change in the ability to speak your mind. The ability to do so from a conservative and constitutional standpoint disappeared. And that sapped employee morale.”

    Cockburn can only imagine what the water-cooler chats are like for those still working in the building. While we wait to see what happens next, we can look out for a new Heritage report which is set to be published next week around the National Conservatism Conference happening in DC. Cockburn got a sneak peek at the draft executive summary. “Free love, pornography, careerism, the Pill, abortion, same-sex relations, and no-fault divorce all became normalized,” it reads, “while marriage and the natural family became stigmatized.” Heritage’s proposed solution? Lots more government spending and tax credits for parents – but only if you’re married.

    On our radar

    HONEY DON’T Alexis Wilkins, the 26-year-old country singer dating FBI Director Kash Patel, is suing podcaster Kyle Seraphin for defamation after he alleged she was an Israeli spy.

    COP OUT Former vice president Kamala Harris had her Secret Service protection revoked Thursday, reversing a Biden-era directive that had extended protections beyond the standard six months.

    PLAY THE HITS President Trump once again spent the morning testing out the White House sound system by the newly paved-over Rose Garden. He played David Bowie, the Beatles, Andrea Bocelli and, of course, “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Misérables.

    Cover me

    Following on from Tuesday’s edition…

    High-profile pundits who fell for a conspicuously AI-generated fake “special collector’s edition” of Vanity Fair featuring First Lady Melania Trump on the cover: Laura Ingraham, Charlie Kirk, Laura Loomer and “Catturd.”

    “Real or not real…hilarious to read the Left’s reaction,” Ingraham tweeted later. Masterful clear-up.

    It’s life, Jim…

    Who is the new acting Centers for Disease Control head, Jim O’Neill? Well, he’s friends with “longevity” enthusiast Bryan Johnson and Gawker destroyer Peter Thiel. He’s also in favor of seasteading and paid organ donation: “There are plenty of healthy spare kidneys walking around, unused,” he told a conference once. Cockburn will take six, please. And though reports say he “supports existing vaccine schedules,” he was also critical of the CDC’s pandemic response.

    While there’s much panic about the ongoing CDC purge, much of it comes from the showily resigning Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, “Dr. Disco Lights,” who infamously issued Covid-era orgy guidelines for New York, Cockburn thinks that what’s going on is a delayed reckoning for disastrous Covid health policies.

    After all, the CDC pushed social distancing, school closures, lockdowns and vaccine mandates, and masking of toddlers against all previous sane public-health advice and public desires. It imposed a dubious health regimen on an exhausted and terrified public. And it also insisted that men can get pregnant. No public agency has ever needed a purge more. As one Cockburn acquaintance put it, “the only thing they’ve done that I agree with is speak out against pooping in the pool.”

    So now RFK Jr. associate O’Neill is in charge, and we have our MAHA CDC head in place at last. Do vaccines cause autism? Cockburn thinks not. Does American public health need a house cleaning? Definitely. Let it ride, Ivermectin for all!

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