by Roger Kimball
The Heritage Foundation’s Halloween fiasco revealed less about antisemitism on the right than about the establishment’s renewed war on Trump’s populist movement.
Is there anything left to say about the Heritage Foundation’s pre-Halloween melodrama? It was quite a scary show. I am confident that when Kevin Roberts, president of that venerable bastion of conservatism, got outside his morning egg on October 30, he had no inkling that his two-minute and thirty-nine-second video clip would precipitate a seismic detonation that would rock the foundation and monopolize the news cycle for days.
The main purpose of the video, Roberts said, was to reaffirm that the commentator Tucker Carlson “remains and always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation.” This came on the heels of Carlson’s long interview with Nick Fuentes, the obnoxious twenty-seven-year-old antisemitic scold who, among other things, idolizes Joseph Stalin and thinks that Adolf Hitler is “cool.”
Some prominent commentators defended Roberts; many denounced him. Roberts tried several times to walk back or apologize for his initial video. It didn’t work. The rhetoric of that first video (“globalist class,” “venomous coalition”) was impossible to sanitize. On November 5, Heritage’s regularly scheduled all-staff monthly meeting turned into an embarrassing extended struggle session. The world knows this because a video of the meeting (taped for the benefit of staffers who were out of town) was leaked and posted online, where it instantly became the object of obloquy and ridicule.
As of this writing, damage reports regarding the self-inflicted wound suffered by Heritage are still trickling in and being assessed. But even sympathetic commentators understand that the damage is serious. “After 40+ years,” ran the headline to one such column, “the Heritage Foundation is collapsing.” Perhaps that is precipitate or overstated; as of this writing, the tea leaves are still swirling. Still, there can be no doubt that there is trouble in paradise.
What are the main issues in play? The one that has gotten the most ink concerns the recent recrudescence of antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment on the right. The two are not synonymous, as Kevin Roberts was at pains to point out in his initial video. But the phenomena overlap and nurture each other.
Another issue, and the one I wish to focus on here, is what I think of as the play behind the play in the attack on Kevin Roberts. John Daniel Davidson, writing in The Federalist, summed up the plot of that supervening play in the subhead to a recent column: “Genuine concern about antisemitism on the right is being hijacked by neocons to attack J. D. Vance in hopes of retaking control of the GOP.”
Bingo. In other words, two separate things can be true at once. I would add that it is not just J.D. Vance who is in the crosshairs but the entire MAGA, i.e., populist, agenda of Donald Trump. A long article published in The Wall Street Journal on November 7 epitomizes the point. “The Crack-Up at the Heritage Foundation,” runs its headline, “Is a Warning Sign for MAGA World.”
It is no secret that the Journal does not much like “MAGA world.” It does not like Trump’s immigration policy, either regarding the border or the illegal migrants who are already in the U.S. It does not like his economic policies, especially regarding tariffs. Nor does it like most planks of his foreign policy.
In the course of its story, the Journal notes that it reached out several times to both Roberts himself and to other Heritage spokesmen. It got no response. That is hardly surprising. The Journal’s coverage of Heritage under Roberts has been unremittingly hostile. Why should they aid the Journal in its attack? Noting the foundation’s longstanding policy of insisting that its scholars speak with a single, unified voice on key issues, the Journal writes that
Today, that almost military discipline has collapsed, and many current and former staffers blame Kevin Roberts, who took over as the foundation’s president in 2021. They joke that the group’s operating principle is now more of a “one man” policy, with Roberts moving aggressively to align the think tank with the Make America Great Again movement. As Democrats revel in their electoral success this week, the divisions at Heritage highlight growing fractures facing President Trump’s winning 2024 coalition.
A couple of observations. First, Roberts is not moving any more aggressively to align the Heritage Foundation with Trump’s Make America Great Again movement than the late Edwin Feulner, Heritage’s founder and longtime leader, did to align the foundation with Ronald Reagan’s version of that same agenda. Peace through strength. Drain the Swamp. Lighten the regulatory burden on business. Lower taxes. I doubt that Reagan would say that “tariff” is the most beautiful word in the English language, as did Trump, but Reagan did impose a heavy tariff on Japanese steel and other goods when he saw that it would benefit American consumers.
Second, there is something deeply méchant about the Journal’s juxtaposition of last week’s Democrat victories in Virginia, New Jersey, and New York and the contretemps at the Heritage Foundation. Those states are deep blue redoubts. Joe Biden won them comfortably. So did Kamala Harris. What they tell us is that committed Democrat venues reliably vote for Democrats. Is that news? What those Democrat victories “highlight” is not “growing fractures facing President Trump’s winning 2024 coalition.” Such “fractures” exist only in the minds of his opponents, be they Democrats or nostalgic, anti-Trump Republicans.
Kevin Roberts ought to have run a rhetorical Geiger counter over his original script. He probably ought to have been more circumspect in his subsequent statements. But the violent reaction against him came not only from people who were rightly exercised by new manifestations of antisemitism. It also came, and is coming still, from people who were never on board with Trump’s populist agenda in the first place.
Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of The New Criterion and the president and publisher of Encounter Books. He is the author and editor of many books, including The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine's Press), The Rape of the Masters (Encounter), Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Ivan R. Dee), and Art's Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity (Ivan R. Dee). Most recently, he edited and contributed to Where Next? Western Civilization at the Crossroads (Encounter) and contributed to Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order (Bombardier).
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2025/11/09/the-heritage-foundations-meltdown/
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