Conservative Think Tanks Should Never Have Crawled Into Bed With Tucker Carlson in the First Place
Explaining the crackup on the American right
On October 30, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts posted a two and a half–minute video to his X account. The institutional American right has been mired in crisis ever since.
In the video, Roberts, who leads the country's largest conservative think tank, came unequivocally to the defense of the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, after Carlson caused an uproar for hosting an antisemitic online influencer named Nick Fuentes for a chummy two-hour interview on his show. The conservative blogger Rod Dreher described the sit-down as "a bright red line that I was hoping Tucker would not cross. But cross it he did….Total softball interview, entirely sympathetic. Shockingly so."
Roberts expressed outrage as well—but his pique was reserved for Carlson's critics, whom he painted as a "venomous coalition" of "bad actors who serve someone else's agenda." Carlson "remains and, as I have said, always will be a friend of the Heritage Foundation," he declared.
This was too much for Roberts' staff, which was soon in what The Washington Post called a state of "open revolt." Multiple research fellows and members of a Heritage-sponsored antisemitism task force have since parted ways with the think tank, and on Monday, the Princeton professor Robert P. George announced that he was resigning from the Heritage board of trustees. "I could not remain without a full retraction of the video released by Kevin Roberts, speaking for and in the name of Heritage," he wrote on Facebook.
"I think the whole organization could collapse," said one senior staffer, who spoke to Reason on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional reprisal. "Who would want to be associated with us at this point? People regret giving us money. The Heritage brand is now toxic."
Roberts' decision to stand with Carlson was the last straw for many people affiliated with the think tank. But the move was perfectly in keeping with the direction Roberts has taken Heritage since he was hired four years ago. And he is only the most prominent movement leader to assume control of a venerable conservative institution and hitch it to an ethos of "no enemies to the right" that always, sooner or later, seems to devolve into running cover for people who traffic in racialist and authoritarian ideas.
'Carlson's Odious Turn'
It's not as though Carlson's decision to platform Fuentes—a Gen Z livestreamer with a history of making Holocaust jokes, who predictably used his appearance on Carlson's show to rail against "organized Jewry in America"—came out of nowhere. Anyone who's been paying attention knows that the former Fox News star left the world of responsible politics behind long ago.
Not that Roberts seemed to care. The last public appearance Carlson made before he was forced out by Fox in 2023 was as the keynote speaker at the Heritage Foundation's 50th anniversary gala. There, Roberts gushed over Carlson and announced that he would always have a job at Heritage if he wanted one. "I've said it before and I will say it again," Roberts tweeted after the event, "@TuckerCarlson is a fearless American who is unafraid to challenge the Washington regime, ask tough questions, and hold the ruling elite accountable."
Carlson by that time had already earned a reputation for dabbling in conspiracy theories and questioning the free markets that Heritage has long claimed to defend. "Why shouldn't I root for Russia?" he asked on one occasion. The Capitol riot, in which a mob attempted to prevent certification of the 2020 election, was "mostly peaceful chaos," he said on another.
But all that was nothing compared to what he's been up to since Fox cut him loose.
In February 2024, after Carlson traveled to Russia and then released a series of bizarre propaganda videos glorifying life under Vladimir Putin, Reason asked Heritage if it wished to distance itself from its onetime keynote speaker; the think tank did not respond. In September 2024, Carlson welcomed an amateur historian and apparent Nazi sympathizer named Darryl Cooper onto his show, referring to him as "maybe the best and most honest popular historian in the United States"; despite the outcry that understandably followed, Roberts proudly appeared on stage with Carlson four days later.
It should not have taken an interview with Fuentes to show people who Roberts' pal has become. "Carlson's odious turn toward the fever swamps of the Right is manifest," the conservative columnist Henry Olsen recently wrote. "Turning his platform over to racists, antisemites, and those who think Winston Churchill was the bad guy in World War II is not journalism. Nor is his fawning praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin and life in modern Russia's gilded gulag….Whatever Carlson's past, his present is antithetical to anything remotely resembling American conservatism."
Or as the historian and Heritage Foundation alum Alvin Felzenberg puts it, "I just don't know how somebody who wants to be a leader of a responsible conservative organization would have such a person for a friend."
'Un-American Ideas'
But Roberts is not the only head of a conservative group with ties to Carlson to come under fire in the last few weeks. Two trustees of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) recently tried to oust the group's president and CEO, Johnny Burtka, citing governance issues as well as ideological concerns.
Former ISI President Christopher Long and former ISI Chairman Thomas Lynch resigned as trustees after the other board members voted against removing Burtka at a meeting on November 7. The pair explained their decision in an open letter posted to X, in which they object to "ISI's celebration of the odious and un-American ideas espoused by" figures such as Carlson and Curtis Yarvin and warn about the rise of "white supremacy, antisemitism, eugenics, and bigotry" on the right.
Carlson was the headliner at ISI's 70th anniversary gala in 2023. ISI also placed one of its three media fellows with Tucker Carlson Tonight this year—that is to say, after his Russia trip and Cooper interview—at a cost of $75,000, according to a document prepared for the board of trustees ahead of the November 7 meeting and reviewed by Reason.
Meanwhile, Yarvin, a blogger and leading "neoreactionary" thinker, was featured in the inaugural episode of ISI's Project Cosmos, a YouTube series hosted by Burtka that launched in August. Like Fuentes (who has claimed, among other things, that "a lot of women want to be raped"), Yarvin has a history of making highly controversial statements, including that he is "not exactly allergic" to white nationalism, that Americans need to "get over their dictatorphobia," and that an ideal society would find a way to accomplish "the removal of undesirable elements" while avoiding the "moral stigma" associated with genocide.
Yarvin, Fuentes, and Carlson are also among those who question or reject the notion that anyone who accepts this country's founding creed should be welcome here. Instead, they suggest—sometimes explicitly, sometimes subtly—that a certain ethno-religious or cultural background is a requirement to be truly an American, such that newcomers have less of a claim to belonging than do "legacy" or "heritage" Americans who can trace their bloodlines to the land for many generations.
Such thinking was until recently considered idea non grata on the mainstream right, and to see it making inroads into respected intellectual institutions has been a cause for alarm among many more traditional conservatives. In a speech at the American Enterprise Institute's annual gala on Monday night, the historian of the American Revolution Gordon S. Wood pointedly warned against a view of American nationhood as rooted in blood, soil, religion, or race. Though he didn't mention Carlson by name, the impetus for his remarks wasn't hard to guess.
'This Is Our Moment'
Burtka and Roberts have both overseen dramatic ideological shifts at their respective organizations. In both cases, the goal seems to be to capitalize on the energy of young conservatives, many of whom feel that the mainstream right has done too little to protect them from the militant excesses of the far left. But as they have come to embody what Burtka once called "the Tucker Carlson wing of the GOP," Heritage and ISI have moved conspicuously away from many of their own founding principles and political commitments—without always being willing to admit it.
The ISI board book claims the purpose of its digital productions is to reach large audiences with the message of "ordered liberty," for example. But that's awfully hard to square with the decision to amplify voices like Yarvin, who rejects natural rights, democracy, and rule of law.
The board book also claims that most of ISI's speakers are old-school Reaganite conservatives. But to take a gander at the list of participants in the first few episodes of its "flagship" podcast is to notice how skewed the group's public-facing efforts now are toward people who embrace a "will-to-power" political approach associated with the New Right, which says that conservatives need to get comfortable using government coercion to reward friends, punish enemies, manage the economy, and reshape society according to their values.
Last year, ISI released a friendly podcast with the self-proclaimed Christian nationalist Stephen Wolfe, who believes (among other things) that the state "in principle" can use its power to suppress heresy and compel people to attend church. During the interview, Wolfe noted approvingly that ISI events these days include many speakers that "the kids call 'based,'" by which he seemed to mean postliberals like himself and other New Right–adjacent figures.
"It's obvious to anybody who's been paying attention for any period of time," says one former ISI staffer who asked not to be named. "Have they 100 percent turned everything over to this new postliberal order? Not entirely. There are still vestiges of [classical liberalism]. But on the whole it's gone."
The rhetoric and ideas coming out of Heritage in recent years reflect a similar change: "This is our moment to demand that our politicians use the power they have," Roberts declared in 2023. "This is the moment for us to demand of companies…that you do what we say. And it's glorious." That is no small departure for an organization whose mission includes the promotion of free enterprise, limited government, and individual freedom.
Given all this, it's not surprising that both groups have experienced high turnover in recent years. Reason spoke to numerous former employees of Heritage and ISI who said that those who hew to an older, more classically liberal understanding of conservatism were at best made to feel unwelcome and at worst pushed out of their jobs. A post from one former ISI staff member on the career platform Glassdoor advises potential applicants that "if you are not on-board with the nationalist/populist/integralist project, this manifestation of ISI will be a bad fit."
Burtka declined to comment for this story, as did a Heritage Foundation spokesman on Roberts' behalf.
'No Enemies to the Right'
It's impossible to understand the ongoing conservative movement crackup without understanding "no enemies to the right" (NETTR), a philosophy that has come to suffuse the New Right in recent years.
According to the reactionary blogger Charles Haywood (whose ideas, incidentally, have been highlighted by the Claremont Institute, yet another conservative institution that has taken a sharp postliberal turn in the last decade), the first tenet of this directive is as follows: "The only present real-life goal of the Right which matters is total, permanent defeat of the Left. All else, including any possibility of the future flourishing of mankind, depends on this defeat and is downstream from it."
In practice, this means that resources must never be expended critiquing or attacking anyone who is not on the left, since doing so diverts attention from the right's existential primary task. A corollary is that right-wing racism, antisemitism, and misogyny are preemptively, indefinitely, and unconditionally absolved, since calling them out would just give aid and comfort to the enemy.
Few people in positions of influence would likely go quite as far as Haywood, who suggests that the left is preparing to engage in "mass murder" against all those who stand in its way. But a general belief that progressives are not just fellow citizens with misguided political views but villains toward whom hatred is the only rational response has been growing for some time. This apocalyptic, grievance-fueled worldview is particularly pervasive among "very online" Gen Z conservatives.
When Heritage under Roberts or ISI under Burtka cozies up to someone like Carlson (and thus, indirectly, to people like Cooper and Fuentes), it's not because they agree with or want to promote his increasingly crazy ideas. It's because they sense the existence of a powerful current of discontent among young people on the right, and they're betting they can ride that wave to clicks and clout.
But even the slightest criticism of a prominent New Right voice would of course put them on the wrong side of NETTR, at the cost of their "based" cred. Once you crawl into bed with the likes of Tucker Carlson, you're stuck. What you told yourself was a strategic play for relevance can turn out to be a deal with the devil instead.
