The Battle for the Post-Trump Right
A group of neatly dressed young people gathered in the auditorium of the Heritage Foundation headquarters this summer to observe the cherished rituals of the D.C. internship. Most of the girls had long skirts and updos; the boys wore suits that didn’t quite fit—still trying Washington on for size. From a low stage, Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage, bantered with them about the constants of D.C. life: their softball team, the ice-cream social scheduled for that afternoon. Then he launched into a professorial discourse about the nature of conservatism. The interns scribbled intently in Heritage notebooks, branded with the Liberty Bell.
For decades, a very specific kind of right-wing kid has dreamed about working at Heritage. “I would look at the building in awe,” a former member of the management team told me. The organization has an annual budget of about a hundred million dollars, and more than four hundred million in reserves. Its properties take up an entire city block on the Senate side of the Capitol. Heritage is the undisputed giant of the conservative-think-tank world—less a tank than an aircraft carrier.
When Roberts took over as leader, five years ago, he was eager to adopt an aggressive posture. Suddenly, managers were speaking in sports metaphors (We’re going to move the football!) or martial ones (We’re here to do battle!). A longtime Heritage scholar named Mike Gonzalez told me, earnestly, “What I say about Kevin—it’s kind of like watching ‘Braveheart’ every morning.”
Roberts is tall and bald, with the permanently gregarious manner of someone who, in another life, could have been a politician. Several people described him to me as a man’s man: he drives a black diesel pickup and wears cowboy boots to formal functions. When the Guardian reported old allegations that he had killed a neighbor’s noisy dog, he took to making jokes about knowing how to use a shovel (though he denies killing the dog). He is skilled at selling Heritage to donors, and also at cultivating right-wing staffers in Washington. Lately, however, the latter crowd has been causing him trouble.
As one former Heritage executive put it, the young people who came to D.C. used to be the good kids—teachers’ pets, class presidents, suck-ups. Now the right-wing dreamers deride their elders as “Reagan Zombies” and “BoomerCons.” They’re sick of the establishment program of forever wars and free trade, open borders and kowtowing to China. Their movement—known as the New Right, or sometimes as the Realignment—is virulently antiwar, eager for mass deportations, and less interested in lowering corporate taxes than in helping families afford houses and cars and kids. “It’s Elizabeth Warren in the streets, economic nationalism and strong Christianity in the sheets,” one D.C. think-tanker told me. The kids these days don’t watch Hannity; they follow Tucker, or maybe Nick Fuentes, the young white nationalist who mocks women and calls Hitler “cool.” “Everyone in the mainstream on the right is puzzled about what to do about the angry young men,” a former Heritage scholar told me. “It creates nasty fractures in the coalition.”
An intern at the event this summer asked Roberts what he thought about Carlson and Fuentes. “Never heard of them,” Roberts joked, to laughter. Then he acknowledged that their appeal was something “we have tried to grapple with here.” He said that it was a reaction to “what is perceived to be the inauthenticity of institutions, that institutions can’t be trusted.” He mentioned colleges, churches, and the government—not think tanks, but perhaps it was implied. “The way some people, a few people, make sense of that is a burn-it-all-down mentality,” he said.
Once the midterms have passed, the conservative movement will have to reckon with its impending post-Trump reality. Different factions want vastly different futures—and, in recent years, these factions have been fighting for control of Heritage. One important dividing line is whether you’re under or over the age of forty-five. Roberts’s hope is to influence the next generation: to disciple them, to direct their anger, to correct their excesses. “This is a civilizational moment for this republic,” he told me recently. “Whatever battles exist out there, whether they’re political battles, ideological battles—God forbid, more real battles—let them be in my lifetime, right now, so my kids don’t have to fight them.”
Heritage was founded in the nineteen-seventies—an age of relative institutional stability, when it was taken for granted that experts could shape history. For decades, it was the clubhouse of the conservative movement, and its alumni took powerful positions across D.C. “It’s almost like we were missionaries,” one former staffer told me. “We were so driven by the belief that what we were doing was important and meaningful.” In 2010, the organization launched Heritage Action for America, a lobbying group that enforced ideological purity on Capitol Hill by shaming apostate Republicans. “There was a consensus, in the 2000-to-2012 era, of what principled conservatism stood for,” Tim Chapman, a former head of Heritage Action, told me. It was more or less the Heritage mission statement: limited government, free enterprise, individual freedom, traditional values, and a strong national defense.
When Donald Trump gained political prominence, in 2016, Heritage leaders recognized his potential—yet the organization slumped during his first term. Kay Coles James, who took over the foundation in 2018, was an uninspiring fund-raiser, and her politics were, as one senior think-tank leader put it, “bog-standard Republican establishment.” During the protests of 2020, James, who is Black, called racism “a fatal wound” in America’s history. Tucker Carlson helped lead a push for her ouster.
The board of trustees wanted Heritage to be relevant again, and Roberts seemed to offer MAGA credibility. He had been the president of a Catholic college in Wyoming and the head of the Texas Public Policy Foundation—an “America First” guy who understood the grass roots. He came up in the populist wing of the Republican Party; as a young man in Louisiana, he organized a rally for Pat Buchanan, the nationalist Presidential candidate. For a time, Roberts changed course, cheering for the Iraq War, but now he describes himself as a “recovering neocon.”
The details of Roberts’s policy preferences weren’t necessarily that important to Heritage’s supporters. The foundation has a lot of small and mid-tier donors: the Midwestern plumber who sold his business to private equity, or “retired parents who got involved because of their woke grandchild’s public school,” as one former Heritage analyst said. They know what they believe: Reagan was good. Free markets are good. Trump is good. They do not follow baroque conflicts online, or “sit around and think about the ultimate questions,” the former member of Heritage’s management team said. As long as you could mail out pictures of Roberts with Trump, it seemed, the donations would keep flowing.
D.C. Republicans, however, were watching Roberts for signs of his true loyalties. One of the leading New Right groups is National Conservatism, or NatCon. After taking over, Roberts declared at a NatCon conference, “I come not to invite National Conservatives to join our conservative movement but to acknowledge the plain truth, that Heritage is already part of yours.” His book “Dawn’s Early Light,” from 2024, reads like a tribute to the Party’s restless young populists, full of scornful references to “wax-museum conservatives.” He insists that American life has become rigged against working people. “The U.S. economy today bears the same resemblance to a system of free enterprise as a movie set does to a real stock exchange,” he writes.
In 2023, Roberts invited Carlson to give the keynote speech at Heritage’s fiftieth-anniversary gala. Carlson spoke on the importance of political bravery. “You look with disdain and sadness as you see people you know become quislings,” he said. “You see them going along with the new new thing, which is clearly a poisonous thing, a silly thing, saying things you know they don’t believe, because they want to keep their jobs.”
For all Roberts’s populist leanings, he has been preoccupied with restoring Heritage’s role as the convener of the conservative movement. “One of the big themes that haunts Dr. Roberts is the big tent,” a former researcher at the foundation told me. A Trump Administration official with close ties to Roberts said that Heritage was roughly divided into the same factions as the rest of the conservative movement. There were the MAGA types, who were inclined toward nationalism and cultural conservatism. There was the wing known as MIGA, a dismissive shorthand for Make Israel Great Again: scholars who favored a hawkish, pro-Israel foreign policy. And there were the Freedom Conservatives, libertarians with a religious streak.
Roberts tried to appease them all. After Hamas attacked Israel in 2023, for example, he agreed to let Heritage host a new conservative task force on antisemitism. But taming the organization proved difficult. Heritage shared the unruly qualities of a liberal-arts college: legacy fiefdoms, ornery academics, outright defiance of authority. Scholars guarded their territory fiercely; there aren’t many jobs that pay conservative intellectuals generously to write books and argue about ideas. To Heritage veterans, it was obvious that the institution’s president should defer to in-house experts. But that left Roberts trying to coax nearly four hundred employees into alignment. “There are not a lot of people who are loyal to the management,” a second former staffer told me. “They’re loyal to the brand of Heritage.”
The organization’s culture involves a great deal of process fetish, a predilection more closely associated with socialists than with suit-coat conservatives. The most telling example is its “one voice” policy. Traditionally, when Heritage was preparing to put out a paper or take a position, staff would assemble in a conference room, where the lead authors would present their view and then get hammered with questions. The ritual could be gruelling—occasionally, there was shouting—but, once Heritage took a position, no one at the organization was allowed to criticize it in public. In previous eras, “there would be one or two, maybe three positions that would come out in a year that I didn’t like,” John Malcolm, a former head of Heritage’s legal center, told me. After Roberts arrived, Malcolm started disagreeing with two or three a month.
Roberts pushed Heritage to promote a pro-family culture, dignified work, an America First national-security policy, and “a virtuous, patriotic citizenry.” He was particularly preoccupied by the declining birth rate. “A family should not be a luxury good,” he writes in his book. He asked Heritage scholars for a major paper on how the government could encourage people to get married and have kids.
The cultural conservatives in the domestic-policy office loved the idea, but the free-market economists were resistant. Richard Stern, who was then the head of the econ office, was charged with mediating between the teams. There were endless meetings, which often devolved into freshman-dorm-level debates about first principles. Stern told me that some of his colleagues “view the ultimate goal of human life as to serve some kind of collective,” adding, “I really can’t justify spending my time and effort serving collectivist ends.” Roberts grew impatient. A former high-level Heritage employee recalled a tense meeting: “Kevin slams his hand down on the table, and he says, ‘Give me my fucking policy paper!’ And Richard Stern just sort of sits there, smiling, and proceeds to tell him all the reasons why he wasn’t going to.”
As the internal resistance deepened, the circle around Roberts grew tighter. Many people left or were fired. The legal center, which leaned toward free-market ideas, had its budget frozen and was forbidden to replace employees who left. A former policy staffer recalled going to work on a Monday morning and finding that a handful of colleagues were simply gone—casualties of the campaign to eliminate what one executive called the Heritage deep state.
Since the Reagan years, Heritage has proposed policies for each potential Republican Administration. For the 2024 election cycle, Roberts envisioned a sprawling initiative called Project 2025. The goal was to unite the conservative movement; more than a hundred organizations eventually contributed. The plan grew to include a database of prospective hires and some nine hundred pages of policy proposals—but its ambition ended up being a liability. “It was a great, unifying project,” a former Heritage staffer who now works at a competing shop said. “Yet it was obnoxiously branded in the public with the bell.” Roberts aggressively advertised his supposed influence in Trumpworld, saying that Heritage was “institutionalizing Trumpism” and guiding such efforts as abolishing the Department of Education and deporting illegal migrants. At some point, Democrats decided that Project 2025 made a great campaign pitch for their side. Kamala Harris called it “a plan that would return America to a very dark past.” Trump distanced himself, claiming, “I know nothing about Project 2025.”
After Trump was reëlected, Heritage found itself in a difficult position—because of Project 2025, and also because Roberts had supported Ron DeSantis early in the Presidential primary. As think tanks jockeyed to place people in the Administration, Heritage seemed marginalized. “I’m sure we got résumés from them,” a former senior White House official told me. But “arm’s length, at best.”
Heritage wasn’t entirely aligned with the new Administration on policy. Roberts was resolutely pro-life, and Trump had backed away from a federal abortion ban. Heritage had also become a vocal opponent of Big Tech, even as tech C.E.O.s sat onstage at Trump’s Inauguration. “Kevin and the leadership at Heritage really decided that, look, President Trump is President,” a conservative leader told me. “To be on the team, you’re not allowed to criticize Donald Trump.”
All this internecine disagreement was largely invisible to outsiders. Thanks in part to Democratic messaging, liberals had come to see Heritage as the malign force behind the new Administration. A comedian from North Carolina named Cliff Cash started recording earnest YouTube videos arguing that Trump had stolen the election. “Project 2025 is really sinister,” he told me. “I haven’t read the entire thing. But, when you look at the policies that real Americans hate the most right now, it’s all from the Heritage Foundation.”
Cash began assembling protesters at Heritage’s headquarters, in what became weekly gatherings. Employees recalled that demonstrators used racial slurs, insulted a staffer’s weight, and even told one young woman, as she headed to Mass, that they hoped she got raped in the ass by a cactus. Cash filmed himself trailing a young man in khakis, shouting, “Looks like we’ve got another pretty-boy Nazi fascist.” Cash told me, “I don’t have any grace or patience or forgiveness for anyone working there. I don’t care if they’re twenty-eight or they run the fax machine.”
On protest days, Heritage arranged for black S.U.V.s to shuttle staff through the crowd. Roberts rallied employees by blasting “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the demonstrators. Inside the building, the protests created a sense of unity. “Nothing brings people together more than this feeling of us versus them,” the former policy staffer told me. But the agitators outside also distracted from the divisions inside. “When everyone is screaming at you, ‘You’re all Nazis,’ you don’t look around at people in the building who you don’t know very well and be, like, ‘So what do you think of Nick Fuentes?’ ” the staffer said. “It turns out, maybe we should have.”
In October, Carlson invited Fuentes to his home in Maine. The two had been feuding, after Fuentes accused Carlson’s father of being in the C.I.A. Now they recorded a podcast episode in Carlson’s barn, under an eighteenth-century Scottish deer-antler chandelier, and afterward they posed for a photo with Carlson’s arm draped paternally around Fuentes’s shoulder. The backlash was immediate across the conservative movement. “No to the groypers,” the podcast host Ben Shapiro wrote on X. “No to cowards like Tucker Carlson, who normalize their trash.”
Heritage didn’t have an obvious connection with the controversy. Earlier that year, though, it had signed an advertising contract with Carlson, who had agreed to read out potted endorsements on air. (“It’s not just thinking, it’s doing, and if you want to support it go to Heritage dot-org slash Tucker.”) By the time of the Fuentes interview, the deal had expired, but no one at Heritage had removed the page promoting the partnership. As criticism grew, someone in donor relations panicked and took the page down. A few sharp observers called Heritage out on X for distancing itself from Carlson.
The official narrative of what happened next—which has been the subject of furious debate in Washington—hinges on a man named Ryan Neuhaus, Roberts’s chief of staff. Neuhaus is a devout Mormon who got married while at Brigham Young University and later became a staffer for the Utah senator Mike Lee; now, in his early thirties, he has four children. “He’s a big-brother figure to younger kids in the Realignment,” the former researcher told me. Behind the scenes, though, he also has a reputation for scrapping. One former Republican Senate staffer told me, “His view was that the hard-line approach was always right.” When Neuhaus joined Heritage, in 2025, he showed little patience for those who resisted the new regime. He liked to respond to critiques by quoting aloud from Roberts’s book.
After the Fuentes interview, Neuhaus started seeing criticism of Heritage online and “got Kevin riled up,” according to the second former staffer. In a meeting the next morning, Neuhaus told senior staff that the foundation should make a statement. Some were confused about why that was necessary, but they agreed to have Neuhaus propose language for approval. Instead, according to leaders at Heritage, he wrote a draft and took it directly to the foundation’s video-production team. Roberts recorded a video, and it went online.
For those who hadn’t been following the Carlson-Fuentes controversy, the video was likely hard to parse. “I want to be clear about one thing: Christians can critique the State of Israel without being antisemitic,” Roberts tells the camera. “Of course, antisemitism should be condemned.” But, he adds, conservatives shouldn’t have to support a foreign government, no matter “how loud” the “mouthpieces” of the “globalist class” are in Washington. “We will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda,” he says. “That includes Tucker Carlson.” He condemns “the venomous coalition” that is “sowing division” by attacking Carlson. He abhors Fuentes’s ideas, he adds, “but cancelling him is not the answer.”
At first, New Right leaders circulated the video approvingly. “Kevin’s a leader for this moment, and I’ve never been more excited about where our movement is headed,” Nick Solheim, the C.E.O. of American Moment, which trains conservative staffers, wrote on X. Curt Mills, the editor of The American Conservative, told me that the video was “a forthright statement in defense of free speech” and an avowal that “anti-Zionism is not ipso facto antisemitism.”
Others on the right thought that Carlson had gone too easy on Fuentes, and that Roberts had covered for him. Some found Roberts’s language to be rife with antisemitic tropes: “globalist class,” “venomous coalition.” Still others felt that the response had been strategically dumb. “It was like killing a gnat with a sledgehammer,” the former staffer who’s now at a competing shop said.
In my conversations with right-wingers who remain angry about Roberts’s video, though, the most prevalent concern was about Carlson himself. On his podcast, he focusses relentlessly on Israel’s sins and has interviewed Holocaust deniers. “Tucker is the leading promoter of antisemitism on the right,” Yoram Hazony, a founder of the NatCon movement, told me. “This isn’t about foreign policy. It’s about causing people to hate Jews.”
At Heritage, the leadership was surprised by the intensity of the reaction. Roberts put out another lengthy statement on X. “Nick Fuentes’s antisemitism is not complicated, ironic, or misunderstood,” he said. “It is explicit, dangerous, and demands our unified opposition.” The replies were divided between trollish memes and a repeated question from movement conservatives: Thanks, but what about Tucker?
As the argument festered, a Heritage tax expert named Preston Brashers tweeted a Norman Rockwell painting of a lone dissenter in a town meeting, and captioned it “NAZIS ARE BAD.” Brashers was nervous about speaking out—“I was shaking as I tweeted,” he told me—but colleagues supported him. “Almost half a million Americans died defending this very simple premise,” Amy Swearer, a Second Amendment expert, chimed in. On the other side, Brian Darling, a lobbyist who used to work at Heritage, tweeted that “virtue signalling employees” should resign, adding that their departure would be “addition by subtraction.” Neuhaus retweeted this.
The conflict had transformed from a fight over a tweet about a podcast to a replay of the supreme moral conflict of the twentieth century. Nearly everyone on the board recognized the need to act, according to one former member. Roberts called Neuhaus and confronted him. Within days, Neuhaus had resigned.
Soon afterward, Roberts spoke about the episode at an internal town hall. “I made a mistake, and I let you down,” he said. “And I am sorry for that. Period. Full stop.” He confessed to not knowing that much about Fuentes. “I actually don’t have time to consume a lot of news,” he said. “I consume a lot of sports.” Yet, even as he gestured at magnanimity—“The buck stops on the desk in my office”—he didn’t entirely accept the blame. “When the script was presented to me, I understood from our former colleague that it was approved,” he said. The implication was clear: Neuhaus had lied, and he had to go.
Many on the right seemed happy to accept this story. Josh Hammer, a conservative commentator, told me that the video “was dripping with such blatant antisemitic overtones that it really does raise the obvious question as to how no one had realized this. Or was it actually the intention of the individual who wrote it, Ryan Neuhaus?”
But at certain happy hours, in certain group chats, a different story emerged. In this version, Roberts’s phone had been deluged after the Fuentes interview with messages pushing him to respond, and he wanted to make a statement immediately. Although Heritage leaders later suggested that Neuhaus went rogue to make that happen, several people told me the organization was too tediously bureaucratic for that to be possible. “There was no way for a product like this to move without significant review,” the former researcher said. I heard from a number of people that senior leaders had been on a Signal chat, editing the script and then vetting the final video.
Within the New Right, the situation came to be viewed as something like a coup attempt. Mike Howell, a visiting scholar at Heritage who also runs a group called the Oversight Project, told me, “It was about the Republican establishment attempting to take back Heritage, because they had lost it.” The grandest theory was that it was a manifestation of the fight over the Presidential nomination in 2028: Carlson had been an early supporter of J. D. Vance, and so the attacks on Heritage were really an attack on Vance and his allies. Among leaders of right-wing institutions in Washington, the senior think-tank leader added, “there was an understanding that it was very important for Kevin to survive this.”
Several people told me that Neuhaus signed an N.D.A. before leaving; he was a young father with a mortgage, and he needed the severance. But that meant the official version of events was left without rebuttal. Especially in the New Right’s young-guy group chats, this was an epochal event. “It lingered for months of us talking about how much we hate Heritage,” the former researcher told me. “I will not go to a Heritage event ever again.”
Despite the controversy, Roberts never took the video down, and he never actually disavowed Carlson. The number of Heritage’s media appearances plummeted, from more than a hundred a week to a handful. A kind of paralysis set in among the trustees, the former board member said. Six left, including Abby Spencer Moffat, an heiress whose family had given generously to Heritage.
Members of the antisemitism task force that Roberts had approved decided to break ties with the foundation. One Jewish donor told me that he had originally supported Heritage because it framed antisemitism as incompatible with the American way of life. But, he said, “anyone that supports Tucker I cannot associate with.”
The fiercest critics of Heritage were those who had spent years waging ideological war within the organization. Former staffers recall that, at one meeting, Robert Rector, a longtime anti-welfare expert, said, “I don’t know why we have all these little Nazis around.” Emma Waters, a staffer in her twenties, shut her laptop and walked out, choking back tears. (Rector, who was summoned to H.R. afterward, says that he called only one person a Nazi, and that he was joking.)
Stern, the economist, started quietly talking with colleagues about leaving, and so did Malcolm, the head of the legal department. When Heritage found out, it fired Malcolm and one of his deputies. Stern mounted a mass exodus: fourteen people, constituting almost three full departments.
All of them had arranged new jobs at Advancing American Freedom, a small think tank founded by the former Vice-President Mike Pence after the events of January 6th put him at odds with much of his party. In December, 2025, alone, A.A.F. raised fifteen million dollars to hire unhappy Heritage staffers. When I visited its headquarters, the atmosphere was triumphant, at least for an office. On one wall, a giant screen displayed media appearances by Malcolm and by Swearer, one of the “NAZIS ARE BAD” tweeters.
Pence wasn’t around, but his office was convincingly staged: framed family portraits, a heavy wooden desk, a Windsor chair from the White House. Tim Chapman, the former Heritage Action leader, is now the president of A.A.F., and I met him in his office across the hall. He’s forty-eight, but his décor evoked an earlier time, with posters of Calvin Coolidge and The Saturday Evening Post. “There’s an institutional impulse, always, to be perceived as hip, or on the cutting edge,” he told me. “We’re overweighting the influence of young people.” He pointed to a poster behind his desk of “Ronbo”—Ronald Reagan’s head superimposed on the body of Sylvester Stallone. “At some point I was, like, You know what, if they’re going to call me a Zombie Reaganite, lean in,” he said.
During the first Trump Administration, there were well-publicized battles between MAGA and the Never Trumpers. Chapman wasn’t really part of those squabbles. After the events of January 6th, though, he rejected what he saw as a growing attitude on the right: that “power politics was the way to go if you wanted to save the country.”
Howell, the Heritage visiting fellow, refers to A.A.F. as “Mike Pence’s retirement home.” The organization is generally viewed with skepticism by movement conservatives. “I wish the mass exit of people didn’t go to Mike Pence,” the former member of Heritage’s management team told me. “The best and the brightest of the conservative movement are saying Heritage is too New Right,” but their argument was undermined “because it was Pence, and he has such a mixed reputation.”
A.A.F. has picked fights with the President, but they’re not the ones you’d expect from the Never Trump crowd. During the 2024 Republican National Convention, when the Party downplayed its opposition to abortion, A.A.F. pushed for a more pro-life stance. The effort was unsuccessful, but A.A.F. demonstrated that it was willing to brawl. In some ways, its existence proves that it’s still possible to fund-raise off the hope that the G.O.P. will return to a previous version of itself, and that the think-tank ecosystem can thrive without any obvious policy results. “We’re not trying to project to everybody that we’re having meetings over at 1600 Pennsylvania on a weekly basis,” Chapman said. “You have to be really realistic about where we are right now. Principled conservatives are not in the driver’s seat of the Republican Party.”
After Carlson interviewed Fuentes, he retreated to his hunting camp and disconnected from the outside world. About twelve hours later, though, he checked his phone and saw a supportive text from Roberts: I will never forsake you. Carlson told me that the two of them were friendly, but not exactly friends; they had gone hunting together once. “It’s not his job to stand up for me,” Carlson said. But then, “the next thing I know, he’s taking it all back. And I felt like, Boy, I wish I’d talked to him.”
Carlson is the embodiment of a certain ethos on the right: a wartime mentality of trusting your trench mates and ceding no ground. He maintained that Roberts should have stuck to his initial statement, saying, in essence: “ ‘Look, I don’t agree with everything Tucker Carlson says, but he’s my friend. And, moreover, if you don’t like what he said, let’s debate it. We’re not going to cancel people.’ ” Carlson told me, “If he’d said that and gotten fired by the board anyway, he would have had a lot of opportunities to go from there, and a lot of money to fund them with. Cowardice is punished. And that’s what that was. That was cowardice.”
Carlson famously got ejected from Fox News—and thus from the conservative establishment—in 2023. Since then, he has been free to pursue his apparent obsessions, including the existence of demons, the evils of Christian Zionism, and Vladimir Putin. He has also become a fierce critic of institutional conservatism; this summer, he announced that he is leaving the G.O.P. “The academic guys, they’re always quoting Churchill, Roosevelt, ‘The Man in the Arena,’ ” Carlson said. “They speak in martial language, which is always a tip that they have no experience of violence.” Heritage, he said, exists primarily to sustain itself: “It’s an electric windmill. It’s a self-licking ice-cream cone.”
The drama around Heritage nearly obscured the interview that inspired it. The episode goes on for two hours, and Carlson spends the first half gently teasing out Fuentes’s story and his sense of grievance. At several points, Carlson disavows antisemitism (“Going on about the Jews helps the neocons”), but he doesn’t ask Fuentes to do so. This outraged listeners, but Carlson told me that his approach was strategic, a way of getting a reflexive troll like Fuentes to engage. He pointed to an interview that Piers Morgan did with Fuentes around the same time. “Fuentes is faster, because he’s younger—that’s just biological,” he said. “But he also has a grasp of postmodern irony that Piers doesn’t. Piers is, like, You question the Holocaust, and Nick goes, ‘Well, is it too soon?’ ” Carlson argued that, if he’d confronted Fuentes, the interview would have devolved into spectacle. “It’s pretty easy to get suckered into a situation where you devalue your own case, sap your own moral authority, and basically look like some geezer lecturing the kids on how hip-hop is evil.”
For Carlson, the more important exchange comes toward the end of the conversation. Fuentes is going on about how women are “frumpy” and “obnoxious” and “overweight.” Women, he argues, are “very simple.”
“Have you ever lived with one?” Carlson says. Fuentes admits that he has not—and then listens, seemingly intent, while Carlson explains the virtues of actual relationships.
Carlson told me that he didn’t press Fuentes on his admiration of Hitler and Stalin because he thinks Fuentes is not credible when he talks about history. But, he said, if Fuentes’s young male fans think that “women are all bitches, or sluts, or whatever, that’s way more real than, like, your opinions on Hamas.”
Carlson’s network claims that his podcast episodes draw an average audience of fifty-six million across platforms. His fans don’t necessarily care that he hosts offensive guests, or that he has reversed some of the opinions he previously expressed on Fox; his willingness to violate the pieties of mainstream media is part of his appeal. In a low-trust environment, Carlson said, “it’s O.K. to be wrong. But any kind of lying or deceit or cloaked motives or falseness is just not acceptable.”
One night in D.C., I had dinner with Chris DeMuth, who spent two decades as the president of the American Enterprise Institute. He picked the restaurant: Ocean Prime, an expense-account spot with leather booths, where the cheapest steak on the dinner menu is sixty-six dollars. DeMuth, who is eighty, seems like precisely the kind of old-school Washington type young conservatives mock these days. Instead, he’s spent the last stretch of his career as an unlikely leader of the New Right.
Over dinner, DeMuth described becoming disenchanted with ideas that he’d advocated for decades. “I would have told you, ‘What we want is free trade and globalization, and we’ll all get rich, and we’ll take that money and we’ll spend it on job training for men who have been thrown out of work,’ ” he said. “I had these little talking points. But they didn’t really lead anywhere.” He grew more concerned about what he saw as the erosion of American culture, with mass migration, the hollowing out of communities, and the weakening of marriage and gender norms. “Young people look at the old people and say, ‘Look at the world you left us,’ ” he told me. “They think conservatives didn’t fight hard enough. And I’ve come to the view that they’re right.”
People across the political spectrum feel that parts of adult life that used to be taken for granted—a house, a spouse, stable employment, children—are now out of reach. The former Republican Senate staffer told me that there’s a pervasive feeling among his young colleagues on the right: “You’ve been lied to.” Received political dogmas ring hollow; instead, young conservative intellectuals are reaching for traditional faith, or for transformative legislative agendas. There’s a lot of worry in Washington about the extent to which the right has been infiltrated by Catholic monarchists and Fuentes devotees. But even less radical young people are grappling with who they can trust and what they believe.
Hazony, the NatCon leader, told me that conservatives “find themselves in the crossfire between a genuinely anti-Jewish, antisemitic movement in one corner of the Party and a pro-Jewish, pro-Zionist wing that is often overreaching in its rhetoric.” He sees Heritage, inflected by Roberts’s populist sensibilities, as crucial for guiding the movement to “where the majority of the Republican Party is”: they “want to see a rejuvenated American nationalism which is not bigoted and hostile to important communities.” Hazony, an Orthodox Jew who lives in Jerusalem, remains concerned about antisemitism on the right. But he resists panicking that Gen Z antisemites will take over. “I don’t think it’s anywhere near time to give up on that generation of Republicans,” he said. “There’s a very good chance that Tucker is going to lose.”
Soon after the Heritage video came out, Hazony contacted Roberts and offered to help. The two have a long-standing relationship; Roberts has called Hazony “my closest Jewish friend in the world.” In the past year, Hazony said, people at Heritage have come to “understand what their role is, which is to hold together and build out the Protestant-Catholic-Jewish alliance at the center of the Party.”
This spring, I visited Roberts at Heritage. His office was the size of a comfortable studio apartment, with cream-colored drapes and walls the hue of orange wine. Hints of Roberts’s Texas background poked through the formality: a cowhide pillow on the couch, a giant Alamo flag over the desk. Roberts, wearing his signature cowboy boots, greeted me with practiced warmth, but he was unmistakably nervous. Not long into my visit, his assistant poked her head in, to make sure he didn’t want to bail on the interview.
When I’d spoken to Heritage staffers, they’d frequently used the words “move on” about the video. But it was clearly on Roberts’s mind. He brought up “videogate” before I did. “Obviously, I stepped in it,” he said. I asked why, after all these months, Heritage still hadn’t taken the clip down. “I’m a historian,” he said. And, besides, “if I were to take it down, it would still exist.”
Roberts acknowledged a larger problem. “There’s a very troubling rise of antisemitism on the right,” he said, adding that he intends to “really make sure Heritage continues to be a vital institutional player in that work against antisemitism.” In think-tank fashion, the organization has initiated studies on the origins of right-wing antisemitism, the first of which is expected this month; it plans to hold events and possibly propose legislation around the findings. Roberts told me that he had called up the presidents of Catholic colleges—he wouldn’t tell me which ones—and “privately excoriated” them for hiring professors he sees as antisemitic. This spring, Heritage hired Luke Moon, a Christian pastor who co-chaired the antisemitism task force, as a visiting fellow. When I asked Roberts whether he had been persuaded that Carlson is exacerbating antisemitism in America, he smiled, as though he had been waiting for the question. “Yes,” he said.
The consensus in Washington is that Heritage has been weakened by the events of the past few years. Although its fund-raising e-mails describe sweeping influence—“The Trump administration has already implemented the majority of our policy recommendations”—the former senior White House official dismissed these claims as “preposterous on every level.” He added, “They’re not coming in and doing briefings. No one’s paying attention to what they’re saying.”
Yet a number of insiders argued that the crisis consolidated Roberts’s power. The senior think-tank leader told me, “The low-key win in all of this for Kevin is now he gets to remake everything.” This spring and summer, Heritage announced a series of big hires, and in May the board gained four new members, all allies of Roberts: Hazony, two businessmen, and Mollie Hemingway, the editor-in-chief of the conservative publication The Federalist. The board seems to be sticking by Roberts. “This is a hard job, and he’ll probably make other mistakes,” Larry Arnn, the president of Hillsdale College, who is a trustee, told me. “He will do what Churchill said: proceed from failure to failure to ultimate success.”
In December, Heritage quietly débuted what it calls its Cornerstone principles. The foundation has always issued grandly named bullet points summarizing its agenda. But the Cornerstones downplay many of its longtime watchwords—individual liberty, limited government, free enterprise. Instead, they emphasize the “civilizational” questions that Roberts is interested in.
After years of delay, Roberts’s family-policy paper came out in January. Heritage scholars proposed a marriage “bootcamp” for cohabiting couples, government-seeded investment accounts with a special benefit for those who marry before the age of thirty, and child-care tax credits for married stay-at-home parents, something that Vance has recently championed. Roberts said that the paper demonstrated a restoration of the one-voice policy. He told me, “When we say, ‘This is one of our priorities,’ you may not work against that priority while you’re at Heritage. And that was happening, and that’s not tolerated here.”
Roberts told me that he is trying to use his influence in Washington differently now. “I learned late last year I don’t have to comment on everything,” he said. “There can be real power in speaking truth to power—whispering.” Unlike many right-wing populists, Roberts has completely backed Trump’s war in Iran. “No president in the 47-year history of the Islamic Republic has been willing to take it on like President Trump,” he tweeted in June. (Last month, Trump hailed him as “a fabulous guy.”)
Heritage is already working on Project 2029, and the staff sent me some promising fund-raising numbers: Roberts, they say, raised ninety-seven million dollars in 2025, outperforming previous years. Yet the foundation still has to contend with the increasingly uncertain role of think tanks in Washington. Ideas travel differently now; it’s not clear that panel discussions and policy briefs actually drive the political agenda. There’s a lot of focus on influencers as the true source of political power. Eric Teetsel, a former Heritage executive, told me that “think tanks need to think of themselves more like management companies.” The podcast may be the white paper of our time.
Not everyone wants to entrust the movement to social-media personalities. Chapman, the head of A.A.F., told me, “The correction for today’s craziness is for people to go and look for institutions that they trust.” Delano Squires, a Heritage scholar whom Roberts described to me as a future face of the right, offered a similarly institutionalist view. “Among the influencer class, I’ve definitely seen the embrace of a robust white-identity politics that has served as a counterweight to what people would call woke politics,” he said. But Squires, who is Black, argued that a lot of the toxicity on the right lives exclusively online. “Exercising discernment in how we engage in the influencer class is a sign of wisdom,” he said.
Institutions like Heritage face a puzzle. They want the kind of audience loyalty that someone like Carlson generates—yet much of Carlson’s appeal lies in being anti-institutional. Roberts told me that Heritage’s solution to the problem of “solid, faithful, daily-Mass-attending guys listening to nonsense” is to create “better things to follow and to watch and to listen to.” Heritage hopes to cultivate its own internet stars, by using in-house experts to move public opinion. “My job is to help build a platform for those people,” he told me. The specifics are still a little vague, though—“that’s what we’re trying to figure out,” he said.
During the intern event at Heritage, Roberts called for an incremental approach to winning over the next generation. Ultimately, he said, America will change as its people change—as citizens live lives of virtue, build families, lift their communities. This kind of plan is “not quick enough for the people who want to burn it all down,” he acknowledged. But Heritage wants to persuade young people “that there’s hope ahead.” He showed only the slightest hint of uncertainty: “Let’s say that we at Heritage are wrong about that.” About the possibility of hope, or of persuading young people, it wasn’t clear. “We’re still going to do the same thing,” he said. “What other option is there?” ♦