Copyright Anchorage Daily News
The Heritage Foundation is erupting in open revolt against its president, Kevin Roberts, as the right-wing think tank struggles to deal with internal and external anger over his defense of former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. The furor began after Carlson invited Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist who routinely espouses antisemitic views, onto his popular podcast. Roberts then posted a video that castigated a “venomous coalition” and “the globalist class” for attacking Carlson, whom Roberts called “a close friend of the Heritage Foundation.” Numerous Heritage staffers and conservative figures said the comments played on antisemitic tropes. A staff meeting Wednesday - Roberts’s latest attempt to quell a week of resignations and condemnations over his defense of Carlson - was marked with calls for him to resign and squabbles over whether Christian employees would be forced to participate in Jewish rituals. At least five members of Heritage’s antisemitism task force have now resigned in protest, and distinguished fellow Chris DeMuth left the organization. The turmoil has implications for more than Roberts’s job. Founded in 1973, the Heritage Foundation has been a pillar of the conservative movement and was the ideological and policy engine behind the Reagan administration. But as Reagan’s party transformed into Trump’s, younger think tanks have gained traction with the donors and advisers closest to the president; this year, Heritage officials were mostly frozen out of senior roles. The issues at Heritage echo other battles at right-wing institutions and in the conservative movement that have been aggravated by Trump’s embrace of people and views once relegated to the fringes of Republican politics. At the meeting Wednesday, Roberts said Heritage was “wordsmithing and workshopping” language over how to distance itself from Carlson, though Roberts said he would remain a personal friend. He called Fuentes an “evil person” but one who “has an audience of several million people, and at least some of that audience might be open to be converted” to mainstream conservatism. Fuentes did not respond to a request for comment. 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.” 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. “This was the final straw for me. It’s just the last one, but there are many that have come before it,” researcher Rachel Greszler told Roberts at the staff meeting Wednesday. “You have always been kind to me, but I do not believe that you are the right person to lead the Heritage Foundation.” This report is based on interviews with 22 current and former Heritage employees and senior figures in the Republican Party, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. It’s also based on recordings of Heritage meetings and phone calls obtained by The Washington Post, drafts of policy papers and organization chat logs. In a statement, Heritage Chief Advancement Officer Andy Olivastro said Wednesday’s meeting included “our usual spirit of candor.” “Our work at Heritage is difficult - but necessary - and requires open dialogue like the one we had today,” he added. Roberts said in a statement that employees who spoke up will not be punished. “That’s not how we operate at Heritage,” he said. “We value all of our people, appreciate their service, and stand unequivocally with those denouncing antisemitism.” There is little sign that Roberts’s standing has been weakened with the foundation’s 14-member board. One trustee, Princeton professor Robert George, posted on social media disagreeing with Roberts’s tolerance for Carlson and Fuentes, but did not call for his resignation. George and other board members did not respond to requests for comment. “The white supremacists, the antisemites, the eugenicists, the bigots, must not be welcomed into our movement or treated as normal or acceptable,” George wrote. “Defending their rights [to free speech] does not mean allying with them, welcoming them into our movement, or treating them as representing legitimate forms of conservatism.” ‘A huge public relations misstep’ Roberts became Heritage’s president in 2021, after leading the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a well-funded right-wing think tank. With Republicans then out of power in the White House, Heritage embarked on its quadrennial exercise of producing a policy blueprint for the next conservative administration, known since 1981 as the “Mandate for Leadership.” This time, Heritage convened a coalition of other think tanks and policy shops - eventually more than 100 in all - to produce an agency-by-agency plan presented as a movement-wide consensus, known as Project 2025. A notable exception was the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), which housed many alumni of the first Trump administration and declined to participate - a split that would later prove consequential. Heritage released its coalition’s 900-page policy at a conference in 2023 with DeSantis as its headliner. Trump was not invited. But as Trump ran away with the GOP primary the following year, Roberts started discussing the project in more pro-Trump terms, even as his personal press secretary left to work for DeSantis. Trump’s advisers, however, would not so quickly overlook how Roberts had contributed to DeSantis’s campaign. They repeatedly objected to Heritage purporting to speak for Trump’s agenda without his approval. “Project 2025 was a huge public relations misstep,” said a former AFPI official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because their job doesn’t permit them to speak with reporters. “It really put the presidential campaign on the defensive.” The conflict escalated as Democrats made Project 2025 central to their campaign messaging, highlighting (and sometimes misrepresenting) unpopular proposals and tying them to Trump. Trump aides announced that Heritage employees would be unwelcome in the next Trump administration, and Project 2025’s director, Paul Dans, left Heritage in a messy dispute with Roberts. “Kevin is a patriot,” said Dans, who is now running a long-shot primary challenge to Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham in South Carolina. “I don’t participate in cancel culture. Tucker Carlson is a leading light of America First, and anyone taking out after him is not America First by definition.” After the 2024 election, AFPI officials had the edge in the Trump transition, and its affiliates went on to fill eight Cabinet-level positions. Many Heritage alumni also joined the administration, but usually with more recent stints at other think tanks, such as Stephen Miller’s America First Legal or Russell Vought’s Center for Renewing America. Miller is now Trump’s deputy chief of staff, and Vought runs the powerful Office of Management and Budget. Even with Heritage on the outs, the administration has implemented numerous ideas in Project 2025. “Kevin was the one pushing the narrative that this was the administration in waiting,” a Project 2025 participant said. “A lot of the work driving the second Trump administration was done in institutions that were not the Heritage Foundation.” The Heritage spokesman said: “The work to save America is not a competition. We’re thankful for our partners in the movement and will continue our important work to bring them together and fight for conservative policies.” ‘Frightened for my physical safety’ Roberts’s handling of Project 2025 was one subject of an anonymous complaint sent to Heritage board members in February. The letter, drafted by three Heritage employees but written from a singular perspective and obtained by The Post, called the foundation’s sidelining by the Trump administration a “historic failure” by Roberts. The letter also accused Roberts of angry and profane behavior in meetings that the employee said made him or her “frightened for my physical safety.” The letter alleged that Roberts favored Catholic employees and humiliated female employees by saying single women without children had “no skin in the game.” A Heritage spokesperson said the letter, which had not been previously reported, was “neither new nor noteworthy” and “no real reporter would take it seriously.” The spokesperson alleged there was a “malign and coordinated effort to silence Heritage and defame Dr. Roberts for fighting against the Swamp.” One of Roberts’s executive vice presidents and new chief of staff, Derrick Morgan, said in an all-staff meeting that he encouraged summer interns to “make yourselves marriageable and go out and seek marriage,” according to a recording of the meeting obtained by The Post. Weeks later, an attorney advising executives on labor law specifically warned that those kinds of remarks created significant legal liability for Heritage, according to two people present at the meeting. In response to questions from The Post, Morgan pointed to a quotation from slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk encouraging people to get married and have children that Heritage displayed on its building. Such views also surfaced in the think tank’s research. A draft policy paper called for robust incentives to induce heterosexual married couples to have more children. Subsequent drafts suggested awarding straight married couples an additional “half vote” in federal elections for each of their children, according to people involved. A Heritage spokesman said the group has not announced such a policy. “Ideas and proposals are debated at Heritage every day,” the spokesman said. During a meeting with one Heritage employee who has since left, Roger Severino, the group’s vice president of domestic policy, allegedly suggested that she and her husband have six children, according to people familiar with the meeting. After a different meeting, a former intern raised Severino’s behavior with the Heritage human resources department, saying that he allegedly suggested during a mentorship session that she consider skipping law school in favor of motherhood, the people said. Heritage declined to comment on Morgan and Severino. ‘It will literally destroy us’ Then, last week, came Carlson’s interview with Fuentes. Fuentes used the episode to criticize “organized Jewry in America” and described himself as “a fan” of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet leader who killed millions of his own people, including many Jews. As pressure built online from conservatives to denounce Carlson, Roberts posted an online video on Oct. 30 in which he refused to “cancel” Carlson or Fuentes. The backlash was swift and widespread, including from Republican Sens. Ted Cruz (Texas) and Mitch McConnell (Kentucky), who criticized associating with antisemites. In a speech Monday at Hillsdale College in Michigan, Roberts acknowledged making the mistake of letting his desire to defeat cancel culture “override” his intention of appealing to “disaffected young men who are looking for belonging and identity by following the wrong people.” But because Roberts also reiterated his friendship with Carlson and interest in reaching out to Fuentes’s audience, the apology fell flat for at least one member of Heritage’s National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, lawyer Ian Speir, who resigned. “When Kevin Roberts repeatedly defended Tucker Carlson after his kid-glove treatment of Nick Fuentes, I lost faith that Heritage is the right institution to lead this important fight,” Speir said in an email to The Post. “We cannot let this malevolent evil make further inroads into our politics and civil discourse. It will literally destroy us.” Other task force members who resigned include Mark Goldfeder, Yaakov Menken and Malcolm Hoenlein. Roberts apologized in private to the task force leaders and asked them for advice on how to handle the crisis. The group proposed deleting the original video, apologizing publicly, condemning Carlson’s antisemitic content, hosting a conference on the debate within the conservative movement, and hiring a visiting fellow dedicated to Gen Z outreach, according to an email obtained by The Post. “If we are not able to come to an agreement soon, the relationship between the Heritage Foundation and the Task Force will be irrevocably harmed,” the group’s leaders said. One of the co-chairs said the group would look for a different host organization. On Monday, Roberts reassigned his chief of staff, Ryan Neuhaus, to a lower-ranking role. By Tuesday, Neuhaus was no longer employed by Heritage. On Wednesday, Roberts called him a “good man” who “made a mistake,” and said he was largely responsible for drafting Roberts’s controversial remarks. Two people close to Neuhaus said he views his departure as an attempt to appease Jewish Republicans. Neuhaus did not respond to a request for comment. People in touch with Roberts said the notoriety around Project 2025 and the frequent protests it drew outside the foundation’s headquarters have hardened his resolve to stand up to pressure. “It’s important to understand the mindset of Heritage, which has been under sustained attack since Project 2025,” a Heritage employee said. “The place is not really shakable.” - - -
