Heritage Americans

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As interesting to me as the anti-anti-antisemitism in Roberts’ video was the degree of indignation it inspired in traditional conservatives, enough so that the Heritage chief hastily backtracked on Friday with a harsh attack on Fuentes—but not Carlson. Rarely have I seen non-MAGA right-wingers as unified or outspoken in their contempt for a prominent Trump crony as I did on Thursday night. Why is that? Who cares what this obscure think-tank toadstool believes?

Part of the answer has to do with the organization he leads. For decades, the Heritage Foundation was a flagship of ideological Reaganism, enjoying the same sort of esteem and preeminence in right-wing policymaking circles as National Review did in right-wing punditry. It was a byword for the conservative establishment.

Under Roberts’ leadership, it’s farted away every ounce of its credibility by embracing boorish “America First” nationalism and regularly tongue-shining Donald Trump’s shoes. Conservatives got used to that, the same way they got used to it from the Republican Party. But watching an institution as august as Heritage go to bat for sub-Trump sleaze like Carlson and Fuentes appears to have shaken something loose. This is what establishment conservatism has come to?

“A watershed moment,” journalist Yashar Ali rightly called Roberts’ video, as there’s really no clearer proof of how mainstream Jew-baiting has gone on the right than Reagan’s favorite think tank whimpering about people being mean to a Nazi incel. And Ali is likewise right to note that, until this week, Heritage had reserved its most embarrassing apologias for the president’s behavior. The fact that Roberts has now begun tongue-shining the shoes of antisemitic influencers says a lot about what he thinks the post-Trump right will look like.

Conservatives, I suspect, are also unnerved by some of the implications in his defense of Carlson and Fuentes.

For instance, Roberts describes the condemnation the two received this week as an attempt to “cancel” them. It isn’t. As I’ve explained before, “Cancel culture, properly understood, is an attempt to bully institutions like businesses into enforcing one faction’s cultural preferences in the absence of moral consensus around those preferences.” People get upset when someone is fired for saying “trans women aren’t women” because there’s no moral consensus around that subject. People don’t get very upset when someone is fired for saying “Hitler did nothing wrong” because there is a moral consensus around that one.

Or was. Framing objections to antisemitism as a matter of “cancel culture” was Roberts’ way of challenging the consensus about whether prejudice against Jews is inherently wrong. He believes it’s wrong, he was careful to say in his video, but he’s implying that the question is no longer settled; it’s now a matter of live debate, and it’s unfair to punish someone for participating in a live debate. The venomous coalition of the garbage-populist right is bent on moving America’s Overton window toward the “Jewish question,” and the head of the Heritage Foundation, in his small toadstoolish way, is abetting the effort.

Then there’s the no-enemies-to-the-right logic that he used initially to defend Fuentes.

“The American people expect us to be focusing on our political adversaries on the left,” Roberts whined, “not attacking our friends on the right.” That quote is part of a rich postliberal tradition in which every vicious, fascist impulse a Republican has is somehow the fault of liberals. An illegal third term for Trump? Bad idea—unless an elderly Democratic pundit starts running his mouth. Presidential abuses of power? Undesirable—but, as our very “normal and patriotic” vice president put it, “we cannot be afraid to do something because the left might do it in the future. The left is already going to do it regardless of whether we do it.” 

Two Jew-baiters backslapping each other in an interview and setting off a giant moral stinkbomb in the process? Not great for the right in the abstract, maybe—but how can we afford to marginalize them when fighting the left is so important?

I say this advisedly, without exception: Anyone who resorts to argumentation like this to avoid confronting moral derelicts inside their own tent is a coward or a louse. It’s nice that Roberts has been belatedly browbeaten (by Heritage donors, presumably) into deciding that Nick Fuentes isn’t “our friend” after all, but Carlson apparently remains a chum in good standing. Either Roberts means to normalize the sort of poison that Tucker is selling or he’s afraid to confront a postliberal as powerful as him, dodging a reckoning by hiding behind anti-left logic that would, taken to its conclusion, justify literally any abhorrent right-wing behavior one can think of.

And the punchline, which you already know if you’re familiar with types who argue like this, is that … no one is more likely to attack fellow right-wingers than the cretins who complain about attacking fellow right-wingers. The glorious crusade against the left that obliges us to unite and bite our tongues about Carlson and Fuentes somehow never obliges Tucker to bite his tongue about hawks like Mark Levin or Fuentes to bite his tongue about Charlie Kirk—or, er, Donald Trump. “No enemies to the right” is a feeble scam aimed at populists to shift their allegiance toward radicals and away from conservatives. You would think we’d all understand that by now, considering that the president himself has been running that con since 2015.

A coward or a louse: Only Kevin Roberts knows which he is, but it’s one or the other.

I’d like to believe that the burst of moral disgust at Roberts, Carlson, and Fuentes that’s playing out among conservatives will carry on into 2028 and the next presidential primary.

I’d like to believe that the righteous resistance to groyper-ism being shown by senators like Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell might cause them to break with the GOP if the party ends up with a nominee who shares either Roberts’ Thursday-night belief that Tucker and Nick are “our friends” or his Friday-afternoon belief that only Carlson is.

But I don’t believe that, because I haven’t been in a coma for the past 10 years.

On Thursday, Erick Erickson wrote, “In 2016, they told us we had to unite with Trump to stop Hillary. In 2024, we’re ‘globalists’ if we don’t want to unite with the Neo-Nazis. The ratchet always tightens.” That’s an insightful point, and not just as an indictment of the inherent extremism of no-enemies-to-the-right logic. It connects the right’s appetite for Carlson and Fuentes back to Trump, who, for all his faults, doesn’t share their preoccupation with certain rootless cosmopolitans. The president’s 2016 campaign conditioned Republicans to believe that any principle, moral or ideological, should be sacrificed for power. Everything that’s happened on the right since then, up to and including Roberts’ genuflecting before purveyors of antisemitism, is a footnote to it.

The funny thing about Erickson’s tweet, though, is that he did unite with Trump after opposing him initially. So did Cruz, of course. And so did McConnell, although the current status of the two men’s relationship is, er, complicated. The moral energy behind the backlash to Carlson and Fuentes this week reminds me a lot of Never Trump conservatism circa 2016, in fact, which initially burned brightly but succumbed to fatalism after the president was nominated and tribalism as the specter of a Clinton presidency loomed.

Republicans warmed up to the president. Why wouldn’t they warm up to the post-Fox-News version of Carlson?

Or, better yet, why wouldn’t they warm up to a Carlson-friendly name they know, like J.D. Vance, who’s hard at work figuring out how to triangulate, if only through strategic silence, the growing divide between antisemitic and anti-antisemitic Republicans?

Take three minutes and watch the exchange between Vance and a student in a red MAGA hat at a Turning Point USA event this week. The student begins by criticizing U.S. aid to Israel but ends with a Fuentes-esque flourish, saying of Jews (to applause from the crowd!) that “not only does their religion not agree with ours, but also openly supports the prosecution of ours.” And the vice president … does not correct him.

He doesn’t agree either, of course. He ignores the claim. But in defending Trump’s Israel policy, Vance notably says at one point that “when people say that Israel is somehow manipulating or controlling the president of the United States, they’re not controlling this president of the United States, which is one of the reasons why would we be able to have some of the success that we’ve had in the Middle East.” That sure sounds like he’s granting the possibility that Israel did “manipulate or control” other presidents, if not his boss.

That’s how it’s going to go for the next three years, I suspect. Vance will ignore the right’s divide over the “Jewish question” whenever possible. Occasionally, he’ll be cornered on it and will tactfully affirm that antisemitism is wrong before changing the subject. Meanwhile, he’ll continue to seize opportunities to defend right-wing bigots whenever those opportunities present themselves to show the Tuckerites that he has no problem with them, even if the political realities of winning a general election prevent him from allying with them forthrightly.

Vance will, in brief, do his best not to take a side. And for most Republicans, including some of those who are angry at Carlson, Fuentes, and Roberts right now, that’ll be enough of a moral fig leaf for them to justify continuing to support the GOP. There will be no right-wing crack-up.

In fact, I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t crossed my mind that some of the Republican politicians who have denounced, and will yet denounce, Fuentes might be doing so not because of moral indignation but simply because they believe antisemitism is a political and electoral loser. That too is reminiscent of Never Trumpism circa 2016. A lot of conservatives who pronounced the president an unfit degenerate who could never win decided that he wasn’t so unfit or degenerate once he did.

Right, Marco?

For now, though, and for the foreseeable future, the Carlson-Fuentes saga will continue to bother many right-wing partisans by testing the core conviction on which their partisanship rests, that the worst Republican remains preferable to practically any Democrat. Trump has dined out on that logic for a decade; no matter how horribly he behaves, the thinking goes, America is better off with him in charge than a demonic communist antifa terrorist like Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom or Josh Shapiro or whoever. Better fascism than left-liberalism!

Is an antisemitic Republican better than any Democrat, though? Well … better right-wing antisemitism in the White House than left-wing antisemitism, no?

That’ll be the GOP’s pitch in 2028 to critics of Carlson and Fuentes, all but daring them to do something they haven’t been willing to do in the last three presidential races—namely, boycott an election to protest the scumbaggery of the Republican nominee rather than dutifully turn out and rationalize him somehow as the lesser of two scumbags.

We’ll see how many partisan conservatives have it in ’em. A few will, but I suspect most will not. Having deluded themselves for years into believing that there might be such a thing as pluralistic postliberalism (imagine thinking a movement that admires Carl Schmitt might be inclusive of Jews), it will be easier to drop the delusion than to drop their loyalty to the party they’ve spent their lives supporting. They’ve already gotten used to making common cause with goblins who call themselves “heritage Americans” to tout their supposed ancestral claim to tribal dominance over the United States. They’ll get used to the logic of Kevin Roberts, a different kind of Heritage American, as well.