Heritage Foundation killed by MAGA
Antisemitism in the GOP? The devil you say!
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RIP to the Heritage Foundation, which functionally died this week, as its most prominent staffers made a beeline for the exit.
The Suspect: President Trump and his posse of online shitposters.
The weapon: Antisemitism.
The room: Phoenix Convention Center.
Having offered up their not-inconsiderable reputations and intellectual firepower, these once-respected thinkers realized too late that they were never steering the ship. The goal was always a personalist regime that wrecked the economy for the benefit of a few oligarchs.
You love to see it … sort of.
Gambling at Rick’s?!?
Antisemitism is at the center of the Republican project.
From decrying “globalists” and George Soros, to embracing the “real” Jews in Israel, the GOP is inextricably entwined with Christian nationalism. In polite company, the party manages to keep this antisemitism as subtext. They openly attack other minorities, particularly trans people and Muslims; but Jew-hatred is expressed as rage at “elites” or ancient blood libel repackaged for the modern era, such as Pizzagate and Qanon.
But “trolling the libs” necessitates saying the unsayable. And Trump, who won by embracing the most online people on earth, is constantly playing footsie with the fringe figures who endorse him. That’s how he wound up hosting Kanye West and Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago in 2022, both avowed antisemites and Holocaust deniers. But bringing trolls inside the tent means the GOP can’t plausibly deny that they’re central to the project.
Republicans can’t very well maintain a veneer of separation from bomb throwers like Alex Jones, Candace Owens, and Laura Loomer when they’re being boosted by the president himself. And so the “normie” Gippers steadfastly assure themselves that they are the real GOP — the signal, not the noise.
In October, Tucker Carlson tossed a turd into this already cloudy punchbowl by interviewing Fuentes on his podcast. Carlson, who has leaned hard into online conspiracies since being booted from Fox, denounced “Christian Zionists” who have been “seized by this brain virus.” Fuentes in turn railed against “organized Jewry.”
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The backlash was fierce. Even House Speaker Mike Johnson managed to mildly tut-tut at Carlson for undercutting the claim that antisemitism is purely the province of the left. But then Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, raced in like LEEEROYYY JENKINSSSS, confirming that there’s no daylight between the conservative graybeards and the online rabble rousers.
“Christians are entitled to critique the State of Israel without being labeled as antisemitic,” Roberts said in a video posted to X, adding later that “conservatives should not be compelled to automatically support any foreign government, regardless of the pressure from the globalist elite or their representatives in Washington.” (Roberts also referred to critics of Carlson as a “venomous coalition.”)
No true Scotsman
For a generation, the Heritage Foundation was a clearinghouse for conservative policy discussions, providing much of the intellectual heft behind the Republican agenda. It routinely submits amicus briefs in important litigation, and its Project 2025 serves as a policy blueprint for the second Trump administration. Along with the Federalist Society, it dictates the conservative agenda and the roadmap for achieving it — all sustained by an unending spigot of dark money.
The legitimacy of this juggernaut rests on its apparent respectability. Put simply, its members don’t think of themselves as internet cranks, even though they can’t enact their agenda without the crank in chief. And insofar as they defend fringe bigots, they’d prefer to do it on free speech grounds. They don’t agree with these terrible ideas — perish the thought! — they just hate cancel culture.
Carlson made it clear that there was no separation between the antisemitic fringe and the mainstream GOP. And Roberts’s tacit endorsement provoked outrage among Heritage’s members, who believed themselves to be on team Nazis Are Bad Actually.
Roberts initially attempted to walk it back, blaming an aide for the gaffe and mumbling that he “didn’t know much about this Fuentes guy.” But the Heritage leader has increasingly embraced the incendiary language of the online right, apparently calculating that it’s now the real locus of conservative power.
Last weekend’s Turning Points confab suggests that he’s right.
Rage stroke
Last weekend was the first TPUSA meeting since its founder Charlie Kirk was killed. And it served as Festivus airing of grievances for the conservative influencers constantly scrabbling for attention.
Ben Shapiro, who fired Candace Owens from The Daily Wire in 2024 for spouting antisemitic conspiracy theories, scolded Carlson, Owens, and Megyn Kelly for boosting Fuentes and his ilk. He was promptly curbstomped by his fellow shit-stirrers, with Steve Bannon saying that Shapiro is “like a cancer, and that cancer spreads.” As the Bulwark’s Will Sommer notes, the subsequent shushing from Trumpland effectively endorsed Fuentes and Owens, telling Shapiro to shut up and fall back in line.
The event brought the Carlson incident back to the fore. It also served as a wake-up call for anyone at Heritage still pretending that MAGA-world is a safe space for Jews.
Après moi, le déluge
Since Roberts’s defense of Carlson, dozens of Heritage staffers have quit the organization. On Monday, at least a dozen more decamped to Advancing American Freedom, a think tank associated with former Vice President Mike Pence. The refugees included some of the most high-profile figures in the organization, and their noisy exit made national news.
“Why these people are coming our way is that Heritage and some other voices and commentators have embraced big-government populism and have been willing to tolerate antisemitism,” Pence told the Wall Street Journal.
The entire Edwin Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, including the nonagenarian Reagan attorney general himself, relocated to Pence’s patch.
In a public resignation letter, outspoken conservative intellectual Josh Blackman excoriated Roberts for getting in bed with antisemites.
“Your initial remarks were indefensible. Your apology was underwhelming. And the lack of any meaningful followup over the past three months has been telling,” he huffed. “For reasons only you know, you aligned the Heritage Foundation with the rising tide of antisemitism on the right.”
So far, the organization appears to be white-knuckling through it.
“Heritage has always welcomed debate, but alignment on mission and loyalty to the institution are non-negotiable,” spokesman Andy Olivastro told the National Review. “A handful of staff chose a different path — some through disruption, others through disloyalty.”
Initially, Roberts told the remaining staff that the skeletal remains of the Meese Center would be managed by Cully Stimson and Hans von Spakovsky. The latter is a familiar figure in left-wing circles thanks to his decades of dogged vote suppression and Bond villain-like visage. But even von Spakovsky wanted no part of an organization that traded its institutional cred for a MAGA hat and a frog meme. By Monday afternoon, Stimson and von Spakovsky were gone too.
“Out: Ship of Theseus problem. In: Center(s) of Meeseus problem,” Northern Illinois University College of Law Professor Evan Bernick joked on Bluesky. But Bernick, who was once a visiting legal fellow at Heritage, says the rupture is much more than a delightful popcorn-dot-gif moment.
Heritage derived much of its prominence from the intellectual firepower of its staff, who saw themselves as conservatives, not reactionaries. If their project coincided with those reactionary goals, well, so be it. At least they were motivated by love of originalism, not gutter bigotry. If you squinted hard, you could see they were the true, classical liberals.
Except they weren’t. And all their work dismantling the social safety net and the regulatory state served only to concentrate power in a demented demagogue and his chattering coterie of clout farmers.
It’s simply not credible that these bigly-brained men (and they are almost all men) suddenly realized their work has legitimized a racist despot. Blackman himself filed the amicus brief that suggested special counsels are somehow illegal — the theory seized on by Judge Aileen Cannon to kill the stolen documents case, but which has now been rejected by Trump’s own DOJ.
The most parsimonious explanation is that these guys wanted to reshape America, and they didn’t care who they had to get into bed with to do it. But now the Trump era is coming to an end, and the man himself is historically unpopular, so they’re taking their ball and going home.
Bernick suggests that the Heritage-shaped void will be hard to fill.
The Meese acolytes will be replaced with people from more radical outfits like the Claremont Institute, with “different ideas about how to change the world,” Bernick said, adding that the reconstituted Heritage will have “less power because it doesn’t have a patina of legitimacy.” The institution will still chug along, diminished in prestige and funding, staffed by the very reactionaries Blackman et al disdained.
“They left because they knew the game was up,” Bernick said. “They’re smart enough to perceive the loss of credibility to the institution and try to distance themselves from it.”
Whether Pence’s well-funded venture becomes a new bastion of conservative intellectualism or sinks into irrelevancy is yet to be determined. But the bigotry enabled by its creators will blight the American body politic for years to come.
That’s it until Friday. Merry Christmas!
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Cheers!
This is what astounds me: “Heritage derived much of its prominence from the intellectual firepower of its staff, who saw themselves as conservatives, not reactionaries. If their project coincided with those reactionary goals, well, so be it. At least they were motivated by love of originalism, not gutter bigotry. If you squinted hard, you could see they were the true, classical liberals.” Originalism… they read the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the writings of the founders, and they believe themselves to be purists. They’ve fooled themselves. They are more like the crown the first American patriots rejected in 1776.
When the Democrats take control of Congress next year, I hope they start working on serious campaign reform to eliminate the dark money in politics. These people are scary. They are allowed to believe what they will, but they should be no where near government.
Loop this in with the Fox-style right wing media universe, the oligarch/inequality problems and a general patina of rot and corruption in civic institutions and government and tie a vulgar bow around the box of pestilence the liberal community will have to develop a vaccine to eradicate, if it can. I’d like to read that story though.