Sometimes a seemingly modest event can open the door to a wider understanding of significant political change. The furor over the decision made by the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, to defend Tucker Carlson after his sympathetic interview with Nick Fuentes, an ardent fan of Adolf Hitler, is one of those illuminating moments.
The Roberts controversy has focused attention on the duplicity of the Trump administration in simultaneously making accusations of antisemitism to extort millions from liberal colleges and universities while disregarding indisputable examples of racial and ethnic animosity within its own ranks.
By refusing to place responsibility for antisemitism within Republican ranks on any constituency on the right, Vice President JD Vance has emerged as a master — or perhaps ultimately the victim — of equivocation as he struggles to maintain support from competing right-wing factions.
Fuentes himself captured the conflicting pressures on Vance, arguing in a video on Nov. 3 that the vice president:
is getting squeezed because the Groypers are on the one hand saying: “Hey, listen, fat boy, we want America first. You want to run for president? We want to hear you say America first.” And on the other side, he’s got his donors, and they’re saying: “They’re horrible antisemites. You have to disavow them. You have to forcefully condemn them. Condemn Tucker. Condemn the Groypers.”
Many on the MAGA right believe that critics are using Roberts as a weapon to weaken Trumpism, to damage a potential Vance presidential campaign in 2028 and to restore the pre-Trump establishment to power.
The antisemitism debate has also exposed a generational and ideological split among Republican activists, as growing numbers of younger Republicans endorse a radical nihilism that verges on an open embrace of fascism, to a degree far more extreme than anything contemplated by their elders.
Perhaps most significantly, the Roberts-Carlson-Fuentes controversy demonstrates that the wounds from the 1992 contest between the paleoconservative faction led by Pat Buchanan and the establishment wing led by George H.W. Bush continues to fester despite — or, more realistically, because of — Donald Trump’s domination of the party.
As a starting point, it’s worth giving a close read to excerpts from Roberts’s videotaped statement on Oct. 30 defending Carlson:
Today, I want to be clear about one thing. Christians can critique the State of Israel without being antisemitic. And of course, antisemitism should be condemned. My loyalty as a Christian and as an American is to Christ first and to America.
In a direct challenge to conservatives who see an unbreakable link between the United States and Israel, Roberts, who oversaw the creation of Project 2025, the Trump administration’s policy guidebook, tells viewers;
Conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class or from their mouthpieces in Washington.
The Heritage Foundation didn’t become the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement by canceling our own people or policing the consciences of Christians, and we won’t start doing that now.
Roberts then raises the tone of his rhetoric to new heights:
We will always defend America, and we will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve on someone else’s agenda. That includes Tucker Carlson, who remains, and, as I have said before, always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation. The venomous coalition attacking him are sowing division.
Roberts may not have understood just how provocative his choice of words and phrases were, but it is also possible that he did. Either way, his two-and-a-half-minute-long video raises a number of questions.
Why did Roberts feel compelled to make it? Why did he choose to refer to “the globalist class” and “the venomous coalition”? When he asserted his “loyalty as a Christian and as an American is to Christ first and to America,” did he understand that he implicitly raised the question of the loyalty of American Jews?
I asked three political and historical analysts to address these and other questions: Laura K. Field, author of “Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right,” which was published this month; Jacob Heilbrunn, editor of The National Interest and author of “They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons”; and Sam Tanenhaus, a former editor of The Times Book Review and the Week in Review and the author of “The Death of Conservatism.” All three responded by email.
Roberts, Field wrote, was explicitly hired to run Heritage as part of a concerted drive to shift the conservative institution away from its roots in the Reagan revolution of the 1980s and into alignment with Trump’s MAGA movement.
The ideological radicalization, Field wrote,
has included a blurring of boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable ideas and opinions — a clear shift of the Overton window toward paleoconservatism and the far right.
In the lingo of a place like the Claremont Institute, which became so heavily involved in the events leading up to and including Jan. 6, Kevin Roberts “knows what time it is.”
In a key marker of the ideological transformation of Heritage, “Roberts effectively pledged allegiance to the national conservatism movement (see this speech in Miami in 2022, where he said, ‘I come not to invite the national conservatives to join our conservative movement but to acknowledge the plain truth that Heritage is already part of yours’).”
In “Furious Minds,” Field wrote:
Ideologically, national conservatism promotes the notion of a single, culturally homogenous nation-state that is under threat from within and without and needs to be protected. This embrace of nationalism — at times an open endorsement of Christian nationalism — is highly exclusive. It cuts against America’s tradition of religious pluralism, as well as against declarationist creedal elements of America’s self-understanding and civil religion.
The mood of national conservatism, Field wrote, “is fervent and unyielding.”
Heilbrunn made similar points but from a different perspective.
“Over the past few years,” Heilbrunn wrote, “Kevin Roberts has steadily repositioned the Heritage Foundation to serve as the ideological advance guard of the MAGA movement, most notably by advancing the Project 2025 manifesto as well as purging a number of the organization’s fellows.”
For Roberts, Heilbrunn argued, “defending Tucker Carlson and, by implication, the odious Nick Fuentes, must have seemed like a no-brainer — another step toward fortifying his MAGA bona fides and allying Heritage with the thunder on the right. Roberts’s real mistake was that he didn’t purge Heritage enough to avoid an internal outcry.”
Tanenhaus, in turn, wrote that Roberts has adopted a warrior-like approach to running a right-wing think tank. He described Roberts’s thinking as:
“Don’t give an inch to woke progressives. The instant they (the left) sense weakness they will attack. Why attack our bad guys when yours are so much worse — woke crusaders for D.E.I., transgender activists, ‘Communists.’ ”
These radical changes on the right are not limited to the leadership of think tanks. In addition, there has been a fundamental shift over the past decade in the composition of the Republican electorate, opening the door to right-wing populism, and then some.
Rod Dreher, a conservative essayist, has emerged as a leading figure on the right warning of the growing strength of neo-Nazism and antisemitism — known in some quarters as Groyperism — among young conservative activists.
“Conservatives in Washington, D.C.,” Dreher wrote in an essay in The Free Press on Wednesday,
have been saying to me that the influence of neo-Nazi Holocaust-denying livestreamer Nick Fuentes has taken off among Gen Z congressional and administration staffers. One older insider put the number of Fuentes fans and fellow travelers, so-called Groypers, in these Washington circles at “30 to 40 percent.”
The Trump administration’s partisan approach to antisemitism is exemplified in the contrast between its willingness to wreak havoc in medical and scientific research at universities and hospitals seen as allies of the Democratic “deep state” while downplaying explicit antisemitism among Republicans, including Trump administration appointees.
During nearly 10 months in office, Trump officials have cut grants totaling at least $4.5 billion to universities and hospitals and collected penalties of at least $330 million, based in large part on allegations that the institutions failed to constrain antisemitism.
Contrast that with the reaction after Politico disclosed on Oct. 14 the explicitly pro-Nazi, anti-Black and anti-Jewish private messages in a Young Republican chat group in “‘I Love Hitler’: Leaked Messages Expose Young Republicans’ Racist Chat.”
The participants, who ranged in age from 24 to 35, Politico reported,
referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.
So how did Vice President Vance respond when asked to comment the next day?
The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys. They tell edgy, offensive jokes, like — that’s what kids do, and I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke, telling a very offensive, stupid joke, is cause to ruin their lives. And at some point, we’re all going to have to say, enough of this BS, we’re not going to allow the worst moment in a 21-year-old’s group chat to ruin a kid’s life for the rest of time. That’s just not OK.
Vance’s answer raised alarm bells among conservative Jews and Christians.
Robert P. George, a professor of political science at Princeton and a leading conservative intellectual, published “Why I Reject ‘No Enemies to the Right’” in National Review. In it, George described,
as the foundational principle of all sound morality: the profound, inherent and equal dignity of each and every member of the human family. Everything else I believe about ethics and politics in one way or another stands upon or presupposes that principle. Any form of “conservatism” (or “liberalism”) that denies it in principle or transgresses it in practice is alien to me.
That is why I believe that the conservative movement, though it can and should be a broad tent, simply cannot include or accommodate white supremacists or racists of any type, antisemites, eugenicists or others whose ideologies are incompatible with belief in the inherent and equal dignity of all.
Without specifically referring to Carlson, Fuentes, Roberts or Vance, George concluded:
Engaging and forcefully arguing against people who deny the inherent and equal dignity of all is one thing. Welcoming them into the movement or treating their ideas and ideologies as representing legitimate forms of conservatism is something entirely different.
On Monday, George announced his resignation from the Heritage Foundation’s board of trustees.
Abe Greenwald, the executive editor of Commentary, wrote on Nov. 10:
The central question about the influence of antisemites’ attempted infiltration of the mainstream right is this: What, if anything, is JD Vance going to do about it. Vance, Donald Trump’s most likely heir apparent, is entangled with the Jew-haters, takes pains not to cross their red lines and clearly feels the need to stay in proximity to their camp.
“We don’t know whether Vance’s attitude is pure political strategy or an indication that he sympathizes with this crowd to some degree,” Greenwald pointed out, adding that if Vance “believes the Groypers have a point, then we’ve entered a much darker world.”
To some in the hard-core MAGA wing, the comments coming from George, Greenwald and others are not based on moral belief but a calculated strategy to attack Trump, Trumpism and Vance.
On Thursday, for example, Roger Kimball, editor of The New Criterion, argued in “The Attack on the Heritage Foundation Is an Attack on MAGA”: “The prime targets are not Kevin Roberts or Tucker Carlson. They are expendable cutouts for the real villain, the Make America Great agenda of Donald Trump.”
Kimball quoted a column in The Federalist from Nov. 4 by John Daniel Davidson, who argued: “Genuine concern about antisemitism on the right is being hijacked by neocons to attack JD Vance in hopes of retaking control of the G.O.P.”
“Simply put,” Davidson continued,
the people who lost control of the Republican Party in 2016 want it back, either by ensuring Vance is not the 2028 nominee or that he has to go through a bruising G.O.P. primary before the general election. If they can’t control Vance, they would rather he lose to a Democrat than carry Trump’s MAGA movement and America First policies forward.
Field makes no claim to know what Vance is thinking but, she wrote, the vice president has chosen to not distance
himself from all kinds of extreme and illiberal ideas — ideas about professional women, about immigrants and now about antisemitism.
There is certainly a political logic to his equivocating approach — it allows him to stay on good, or at least neutral, terms with as many people on the right as possible, and so to minimize the extent to which these ugly controversies impact his own popularity within the movement. Alternatively, perhaps he simply agrees with the more extremist and bigoted parts of the MAGA movement. I suspect it is mainly the former — a political calculation. Either way, it is a total failure of moral leadership.
Heilbrunn contended that
Vance has his finger on the pulse of the youthful right. He has long positioned himself as a foe of the neocons who championed the second Iraq war. He belongs to a faction that believes that the mostly Jewish neocons are globalist interlopers who usurped true Republican principles and debauched the G.O.P.
Now he is following the politically correct, as it were, course in refusing to repudiate antisemitism on the right, which has long been a constituent element of the movement. It dates back to the 1930s, when leading figures on the right were not so much isolationist as pro-Nazi — they maintained that America should ally itself with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union rather than with Great Britain.
In this context, Heilbrunn argued,
Vance is helping to return the political right to its true origins after World War I, when it embraced hostility to immigration and cozied up to a variety of foreign dictators, including Hitler and Mussolini. Today Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban are its new heroes. My take: If he rises to power, Vance will make Trump look like milquetoast.
Tanenhaus said:
The logic is clear. Vance is one of two or three very likely successors to President Trump. He also has dual personae. He is both sophisticated political thinker and active politician. He grasps as well as anyone that MAGA today has two identities. In policy terms it involves a series of well-argued beliefs — about history, constitutionalism, the role of religion, the primacy of the traditional (heteronormative) family, the meaning of civic engagement and America’s “common culture.”
MAGA’s second identity, Tanenhaus wrote,
is emotive, impassioned, with a powerful footing in flyover country, the nation’s cultural outskirts and geographical hinterlands where there are substantial votes to be harvested. Vance is a genuine product of that world.
Vance’s future depends on achieving a durable equipoise between these two identities, the thinking man and the foxhole fighter. What to progressives looks like a failure of nerve or moral courage is in reality an opportunity for him to remind the MAGA base, especially its Zoomers, that he is with them, just as he dignifies Trumpism through his intellect.
How is this intraparty conflict likely to play out over time? Clearly, the answer will depend on the Republican choice of a presidential nominee in 2028 and the success or failure of that candidate.
There is, however, one major indication that what is now called the Groyper faction in the Republican Party will remain a force on the right for some years to come: Donald Trump.
Until Sunday, Trump stayed largely silent on the Heritage-Roberts-Carson-Fuentes debate, a silence preceded by his 2017 claim that marchers chanting “Jews will not replace us” at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., included some “very fine people” and his repeated willingness to appoint men and women with antisemitic records to public office.
Gabriel Schoenfeld, a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center, a think tank that seeks to find market solutions to social and economic problems, noted in an essay in The Bulwark last Tuesday, that among the conservative critics of Roberts, Carlson and Fuentes,
something critically important is missing from their indictment. These figures conspicuously omit any accounting of the prime force fostering a political climate in which all forms of hatred — very much including antisemitism — President Donald J. Trump.
It was Trump, Schoenfeld pointed out,
who nominated to the post of special counsel of the United States Paul Ingrassia, a man who boasted of having “a Nazi streak” in his character. When Ingrassia’s nomination was headed for certain defeat in the Senate, Trump retained him in his current White House role as a liaison to the Department of Homeland Security.
Trump himself may not be an antisemite, Schoenfeld noted,
but he has been a font of hatred writ large, and a facilitator of vicious antisemites. With the White House imprimatur behind him, he commands a vast audience, with millions of fervent true believers in its ranks. If there has been a normalization of antisemitism in America, it comes in no small part from the very top.
When Trump finally did break his silence over the furor at Heritage, his commentary was telling. “We’ve had some great interviews with Tucker Carlson, but you can’t tell him who to interview,” he said, before adding:
I mean, if he wants to interview Nick Fuentes — I don’t know much about him, but if he wants to do it, get the word out, let him. You know, people have to decide. Ultimately, people have to decide.
In other words, just as he did in the case of the march in Charlottesville, Trump has reaffirmed his adherence to the MAGA principle that there should be no enemies on the right, no matter who they are or what they believe.
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