Resignations, Rebellion, and a Right-Wing Rift: Heritage Implodes Over Carlson–Fuentes Affair
Folks—let me have your attention for a moment.
Because I’ve been hearing some rumbling, some grumbling, a downright thundering from deep inside one of Washington’s most conservative policy halls.
Yes sir, trouble.
Trouble with a capital T, and that rhymes with C, that stands for Carlson, and that stands for controversy. (With apologies to Meredith Wilson)
Yes, sir, there’s trouble at the Heritage Foundation—real trouble. How deep the rift runs is still an open question, but one thing’s clear: Heritage, the powerful and heavily funded right-wing think tank that brought America Project 2025, is grappling with a very public, very internal crack-up. It’s a foundational kerfuffle, a battle that’s anything but civil.
Since its founding in 1973, Heritage has served as the one of the most important intellectual command centers of the conservative movement. It helped shape Ronald Reagan’s governing blueprint and, decades later, supplied Donald Trump with the ideological scaffolding he used to reshape the federal government. Now the same institution that has spent half a century defining the right is being shaken from within—over Tucker Carlson’s decision to hand a megaphone to white supremacist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.
The current troubles was kicked off when Heritage President Kevin Roberts’ defended Tucker Carlson’s super-softball interview with Fuentes. In a video statement, Roberts called Carlson “a close friend of the Heritage Foundation,” and denounced what he described as a “venomous coalition” and the “globalist class” attacking Carlson. Roberts’ defense delighted Fuentes, but caused several Heritage staff members to resign.
Senior Heritage fellows — including Stephen Moore, Christopher DeMuth, and Adam Mossoff — resigned. Mark Goldfeder stepped down from the foundation’s National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, saying he “cannot serve under someone who thinks Nazis are worth debating.” Newsmax reported that, the think tank’s antisemitism task force, Project Esther, left Heritage after more than a dozen additional members or advisers quit.
Although Roberts later walked back parts of his statement, he has refused to criticize or distance himself — or Heritage — from Carlson’s repeated amplification of antisemitic narratives.
Princeton University professor Robert P. George, a prominent legal scholar, philosopher, and longtime conservative intellectual, resigned from Heritage’s board. “I have resigned from the board of the Heritage Foundation,” George wrote. “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. 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.”
George said he hoped Heritage would remain faithful to “the moral principles of the Judeo-Christian tradition” and to the conviction that every human being is “created equal” and endowed with “unalienable rights.”
The Heritage Foundation was “the brain of the conservative movement”, Fuentes recently told his viewers, whose work is “sort of like gospel for [Republicans] in the US Congress. It’s a big deal.” Groyperism, Fuentes argued, was now “inside the institutions.”
According to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, “The Groyper movement is a loose network of white nationalist activists and internet trolls who gravitate around several key online influencers. Their goal is to push and normalize white nationalist ideas within mainstream conservatism.
“Self-named after the ‘Groyper’ toad image, which became popular as an explicitly racist coded variation of the Pepe the Frog meme often affiliated with the ‘alt-right’, the Groypers emerged offline as a movement in 2019 and followed the decline of the alt-right. Initially followers of the ‘America First’ podcast host Nick Fuentes, they describe themselves as ‘American nationalists‘ and hold similar beliefs to the alt-right.
“Groypers represent a new momentum within American white nationalism. They have a particular focus on capturing members of Generation Z, and in portraying themselves as American Christian nationalists, hope to attract disaffected conservatives by exploiting schisms and grievances within mainstream conservatism.”
On a recent episode of C-SPAN’s “Ceasefire” with Politico’s Dasha Burns, Robert P. George put it this way: “Sometimes one finds one’s self in a situation where it’s impossible to go along with something that one’s friends and colleagues and comrades are proposing, or promoting, or going along with.”
Internal dissent, high-profile resignations, and reports of donor anxiety have undeniably shaken the Heritage Foundation, raising the prospect that one of the right’s most influential think tanks could emerge fractured or weakened. Its public credibility—especially on issues of antisemitism and extremism—has taken a hit. Yet, as of this writing, there is no evidence that Heritage has lost real influence inside the White House or among Republican lawmakers. My bet? Heritage will weather this storm. It will regroup, refill its coffers, and continue serving as the intellectual engine of the conservative movement, just as it has since 1973.