The Right’s Post-Trump Civil War Is Already Underway
On the day before Halloween, Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, released a horror film of his own. Roberts stared into the camera, American flag on his lapel, and cast in his lot with Tucker Carlson, whom he called “a close friend” of the storied think tank. Hours earlier, Carlson had interviewed Nick Fuentes, king of the white nationalist groyper army, without pressing him on his most radical statements about the merits of Adolf Hitler and killing “perfidious Jews.” Roberts disavows Fuentes in his video, though with a caveat: Although he disagrees with and sometimes abhors groyper rhetoric, “canceling” Fuentes “is not the answer either,” and he condemns “a globalist class” for threatening Carlson over a commitment to debate. Fuentes later thanked Roberts for releasing the video.
Now a simmering civil war within Heritage — and the conservative movement itself — has spilled out into public view. One faction, led by Jewish conservatives and Christian Zionists like Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, accuses Roberts of coddling an antisemite. Another prefers a “no enemies to the right” approach, which mirrors the language that Roberts used in his video. There have been prominent resignations, a contentious town hall at Heritage, and denunciations of various sorts. Throughout it all, the groypers cavort. The Establishment right, which they despise, may be ripe for implosion at last.
There’s more at stake than the future of Heritage itself. As Ian Ward reported at Politico, the Roberts video arrived at a contentious moment for American conservatives. The post-Trump trajectory of the right is not yet assured, and the movement is consumed by questions of succession, ideology, and strategy. To many, like Roberts, the furthest-right fringe is more palatable than liberalism or the neoconservatism that preceded the Obama years. Only an alliance of the most radical tendencies on the right can transform the nation for decades to come, or so the logic goes. Roberts often says he knows “what time it is in America,” a popular phrase inside extremist circles. “If you know what time it is, you know that the hour is late, and it is time for radical action in America,” the political theorist Laura K. Field explains in her new book, Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right. If Roberts has read the clock correctly, Tucker Carlson is more useful to the right than his critics inside Heritage, no matter who he invites on his show.
In one sense, Roberts is writing a new chapter in an old story. American conservatives have long dithered over the exact parameters of their reactionary movement. Admirers of William F. Buckley still credit him for purging the Birchers from the conservative fold over their paranoid and often antisemitic views, but his defenders can overstate his moral courage. In Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right, historian David Austin Walsh observed that Buckley “repudiated the popular front approach in his letters to prominent Birchers” while “attempting to keep the public dispute confined to” the group’s founder, Robert Welch, “not the John Birch Society as a whole.” Walsh adds that Buckley maintained a friendship with Revilo Oliver, a classicist and founding Bircher, “despite the latter’s drift into explicit antisemitism,” though they would later sever ties. To Oliver, “time was running out for America and extreme times called for extreme measures,” and that tactical radicalism, “more than Oliver’s racism or even antisemitism,” would alienate Buckley for good.
Roberts is neither Buckley nor Oliver, even if he shares the latter’s extremist urgency. But the conservative world is still marked by factional disputes and prejudice, and Roberts is making familiar calculations at the helm of Heritage. So is the institution’s board. By the time Roberts took the job in 2021, he’d aligned himself with MAGA and the extreme right. He succeeded Kay Cole James, a Black conservative who, Field notes, “was much more moderate than” her predecessor James DeMint. “The choice of Roberts meant, in effect, that the board of trustees at Heritage believed Trump-style right-wing populism to be the future of American conservatism,” Field adds. A few years on, the consequences are hard to deny: Roberts brought the fringe with him into the heart of movement conservatism. There was never that much distance between the Establishment and the extremists of the right, even in Buckley’s era; now they are even closer.
Field calls Roberts an “activist,” which is accurate, and his trajectory tells us a great deal about the transmogrification of the right wing. Buckley was a snob who launched himself by attacking his alma mater, Yale, for liberal wrongthink. Roberts transcended a troubled working-class upbringing in Louisiana for an academic career. But Roberts, a hardline Catholic, would not last long in academia, despite his early promise as a historian of Black enslavement in America. He abandoned a tenure-track role at New Mexico State University and eventually returned to his hometown, where he founded a conservative, K-12 Catholic school. From there, he jumped to the presidency of Wyoming Catholic College, another small, conservative institution “where he performatively refused federal aid,” as Samuel G. Freedman reported in the Los Angeles Review of Books. At the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a powerful far-right think tank, he had an opportunity to modify state law instead of young minds, which shifted him further away from intellectualism and scholarship toward more aggressive forms of culture war. To attend a gala for The American Conservative, he drove “a black diesel Ford F-150 with yellow ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ license plates complete with coiled timber rattler,” WyoFile reported last year. A “Come and Take It” bumper sticker adorns the vehicle.
Roberts likes a fight. The truck is one thing; at his book launch in Manhattan last year, he told a Guardian reporter to “go to hell” and kicked him out of the event. (I was there, angling for a chance to speak with him, only to watch him stomp away in his fancy cowboy boots.) The Washington Post reports that an anonymous letter sent by a Heritage staffer to members of the board this year “accused Roberts of angry and profane behavior” and said he “favored Catholic employees and humiliated female employees.” It’s possible that with his Carlson video, Roberts has challenged enemies he cannot defeat. Critics blame him, too, for his handling of Project 2025, which became a public-relations mishap for Heritage with the public and the Trump administration, even though its proposals remain influential.
Another question lingers, unanswered. Why release the video at all? Carlson may be a friend of Heritage by Roberts’s definition, but he is not an employee, and Fuentes’s antisemitism, anti-Black racism, and misogyny are well known. Viewed this way, Roberts looks buffoonish: He blamed an aide for scripting the video and portrayed himself as a mark who “didn’t know much about this Fuentes guy” during a meeting with his staff. But he may be more than a fool. Fuentes and his loathing for the late Charlie Kirk are the stuff of MAGA legend, and it caught the attention of the mainstream press. Even if Roberts was unfamiliar with Fuentes or his war with Kirk, he ought to know something about his pal Carlson, who has trafficked in antisemitic conspiracy theories for years. At Kirk’s memorial service in September, Carlson described “a bunch of guys sitting around eating hummus” while plotting the execution of Jesus Christ. In 2024, the former Fox host interviewed Darryl Cooper, a Nazi apologist, and brought him back for a second appearance earlier this year. What’s more, as Ward noted at Politico, the bloodshed in Gaza has precipitated strife between nationalist and populist figures, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, and traditional defenders of Israel on the right. By releasing the video, Roberts sided with the nationalists. “The message was unequivocal: From Heritage’s point of view, there are no enemies to its right,” Ward concludes.
As journalist Will Sommer put it after Carlson’s interview with Fuentes, “The right has no immune system against hatemongers and grifters.” That’s visible in the rise of Fuentes, who once met with Donald Trump, and in Roberts’s career, too. Roberts may not be a groyper, but he volunteered for Pat Buchanan’s 1992 presidential campaign and told the WyoFile reporter Rone Tempest that “I don’t think I’ve had any radical shifts in perspective on anything” since then. Buchanan is an antisemite who wrote for VDARE, a white-nationalist website, from 2006 until his retirement in 2023. Roberts calls him a “Cassandra” in Dawn’s Early Light, published last year, for which J.D. Vance wrote the foreword. Like Vance, Roberts has spoken at National Conservatism conferences, where fellow speakers are skeptical — to say the least — of religious pluralism and equal rights for non-Christians, including Jews. Roberts’s video doesn’t help: “Globalist class” is such a loud dog whistle that even Buchanan in his dotage could hear it.
At the Heritage town hall, convened by Roberts in a bid to salvage his power, the conservative scholar Robert Rector invoked Buckley. “The boundaries that he set forth, William Buckley, in the early 1960s, were twofold,” Rector said. “You have to expunge all antisemitism, all of it. But that’s just part of it … the other is you have to expel the lunatics.” In that rosy version of history, men and women like Roberts are traitors to Buckley and the conservative movement he bequeathed them. Yet the right’s eternal patience with antisemitism, and all other forms of racism and misogyny and queer hatred, are precisely what brought us here. And so, despite all the heat, the board of Heritage is siding with Roberts for now. It’s a somewhat risky calculation. If they continue to support him and his allies, they might further marginalize the institution with the public. Groypers are not popular. Nor are Roberts’s political views. Even Trump is deep underwater with voters. To the most extreme factions of the right, however, popularity doesn’t matter — not when you know what time it is. Their goal is to save America, even if that means saving it from Americans themselves. Roberts is digging in for a war.
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