After 40+years, the Heritage Foundation is collapsing

Tucker Carlson went too far and the foundation’s president went too far in defending him.

The Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post reported, “Heritage staff in open revolt over leader’s defense of Tucker Carlson.

“The departures and condemnations built on brewing frustrations with Kevin Roberts’s handling of Project 2025 and internal sexism allegations.”

No offense to readers named Roberts, but your tribe is having a bad week. The city of New York had a better week even with a Muslim-loving Marxist picked to be its new Dear Leader.

This Roberts—not the chief justice who is about to shut down the economy by vetoing Trump’s tariffs—defended Tucker Carlson for giving a platform to Nick Fuentes, who likes Nazis, Stalin and Kamala Harris. The defense was literally revolting as staff revolted. All 5 members of its task for on fighting anti-Semitism resigned.

The Times of India summarized the situation well:

Tucker Carlson sat down with Nick Fuentes for a two-hour interview where Carlson was seen gently disagreeing with Fuentes’ statement that the loyalty of the Jewish people to the US is always a matter of suspicion. Carlson said it’s not true as many Jews have been critical of Israel but he railed against “Christian Zionists” and called Texas Senator Ted Cruz and former president George W Bush victims of “brain virus.”

“If you sit there with someone who says Adolf Hitler was very, very cool and that their mission is to combat and defeat ‘global Jewry,’ and you say nothing, then you are a coward and coward and you are complicit in that evil,” Ted Cruz attacked Carlson.

Now for the punchline: Roberts said he didn’t know much about the situation when he supported Carlson’s decision to give Fuentes two hours of airtime and Carlson’s seal of approval. The idea that conservatives might have a legitimate beef did not seem to enter the mind of Roberts.

The Heritage Foundation pays him $953,920 a year in salary and benefits.

WaPo portrayed Roberts as tone-deaf:

Legal fellow Amy Swearer during the meeting called Roberts’s handling of the controversy “a master class in cowardice that ran cover for the most unhinged dregs of the far right” and described a loss of confidence in his leadership. Asked later in the meeting about his use of the term “globalists” — a common dog whistle for a conspiratorial view of world “Jewry” — Roberts said he didn’t mean to imply criticism of anyone of any particular faith.

Some staffers defended Roberts and pushed back against his critics. One wanted to know what would happen to those who agreed with Roberts and Carlson, and another likened employees talking to reporters to “Judas.” Roberts’s speechwriter, Evan Myers, suggested that Heritage’s attempts to address accusations of antisemitism would eventually mean he would be required to attend a Shabbat dinner, which he said would conflict with his faith.

Another Heritage executive shot back, “I’m deeply sorry that you could not see that as a generous offer but rather a personal attack on you.”

Carlson is suffering the desperation that hit Candace Owens in that he is trying to gain followers by pushing the envelop farther and farther into the Crazy World of Napoleon the 14th.

The Fuentes flak stems in large part from staining conservatives as Nazis while liberals engage in Nazism. Obama treated the FBI as his gestapo, using it and Judge Dread Boasberg to spy on people Obama marked as his enemies.

The left’s embrace of Hamas—which raped, murdered and/or took hostage 1,400 people at an Israeli peace festival—should make Democrats so toxic that they never show their faces again.

But Carlson and Fuentes have aided and abetted the Nazi libel against Trump and his supporters. Consider this from the New York Times:

For much of President Trump’s second term, the political heirs of his “America First” agenda have tried to form an intellectual framework for their movement that embraces nationalism while keeping overt bigotry out of the coalition.

With the rise of Nick Fuentes, a 27-year-old white nationalist, and his young, racist and anti-Semitic “Groyper” movement, some fear the exercise has failed.

Fuentes is not an animal. He is a plant.

He has a right to say what he wants and Carlson has a right to grant him legitimacy but the Heritage Foundation has no obligation to defend this libel. Roberts is a saboteur. WaPo reminded us:

Wednesday’s revolt reflected longer-running tensions with Roberts’ four-year-old tenure atop the $335 million foundation. During the 2024 campaign, he antagonized President Donald Trump’s team by initially favoring his top primary rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and then by promoting Heritage’s “Project 2025” as a Trump-aligned initiative, fueling Democratic attacks. Roberts stunned traditional conservatives with policy positions that spurned long-standing orthodoxies, such as his opposing aid to Ukraine in its defense against Russian incursion. And he is facing complaints from female staffers that they face demeaning treatment.

The Heritage Foundation after 40+ years of doing business has atrophied. That’s how it works for think tanks and conservative think tanks are not immune.

9 years ago, the editor in chief of the Daily Caller wrote, “Donald Trump Is Shocking, Vulgar and Right.”

This passage was so spot on that I quoted it in my book Trump the Press:

Consider the conservative nonprofit establishment, which seems to employ most right-of-center adults in Washington. Over the past 40 years, how much donated money have all those think tanks and foundations consumed? Billions, certainly. (Someone better at math and less prone to melancholy should probably figure out the precise number.) Has America become more conservative over that same period? Come on. Most of that cash went to self-perpetuation: Salaries, bonuses, retirement funds, medical, dental, lunches, car services, leases on high-end office space, retreats in Mexico, more fundraising. Unless you were the direct beneficiary of any of that, you’d have to consider it wasted.

Pretty embarrassing. And yet they’re not embarrassed. Many of those same overpaid, underperforming tax-exempt sinecure-holders are now demanding that Trump be stopped. Why? Because, as his critics have noted in a rising chorus of hysteria, Trump represents “an existential threat to conservatism.”

Let that sink in. Conservative voters are being scolded for supporting a candidate they consider conservative because it would be bad for conservatism? And by the way, the people doing the scolding? They’re the ones who’ve been advocating for open borders, and nation-building in countries whose populations hate us, and trade deals that eliminated jobs while enriching their donors, all while implicitly mocking the base for its worries about abortion and gay marriage and the pace of demographic change. Now they’re telling their voters to shut up and obey, and if they don’t, they’re liberal.

The editor’s name?

Tucker Carlson.