By Mike Burke
Wednesday, December 10, 2025
Born in 1973 as the fortress of conservative principle,
the Heritage Foundation is in danger of becoming a monument to its
abandonment—a citadel where moral clarity has been bartered for the applause
and approval of radicals who despise the truths America stands for. Among those
truths are the sanctity of the individual, the dignity of freedom, and the
covenant that binds both men and nations to the same moral law—the very
covenant that joins America to Israel and the Jews to the West. This covenant
is sealed in the blood of those who fell at Normandy, at Midway, and on the
long road to Berlin. It is the mortal sin of those who, in renouncing virtue,
surrender strength.
The unmasking began with Tucker Carlson, who began his
career as a young conservative journalist at a neoconservative magazine,
shifted into mainstream television commentary on CNN and MSNBC, and then
finally ended up back on the right on the Fox News Channel—where, after failing
repeatedly on other cable channels, he became a sensation following the first
election of Donald Trump. Cast out of Fox News in 2023, his video podcast has
become a travelling stage show of grievance against America and the West. In a
recent interview with the Kremlin-backed network RTVI, he hailed Vladimir Putin
as “the most popular leader in the world, by far.” Days later, on October 28,
2025, he invited into his sanctum sanctorum his fellow streaming-media
superstar Nick Fuentes, all of 27 years old but yet a decade-long veteran of
talking into a microphone from a basement to millions of other young men in
basements. Fuentes is a Holocaust denier, white nationalist, lover of Joseph
Stalin, loather of Donald Trump, and literally a professional anti-Semite.
Fuentes ranted about “Zionist Jews,” accused them of
corrupting conservatism, and denounced Israel as a moral plague. Carlson did
not argue. He smiled. He nodded. He allowed hatred to sit unopposed beneath the
supposed banner of “true” American conservatism. Worse still, he seemed to
agree. In the course of their exchange, Carlson explained that “Zionist Jews”
and “Christian Zionists” alike had captured American foreign policy, implying
that the United States itself had fallen under alien control. It was a lie as
old as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, one of the world’s first
active disinformation projects, conjured up by the Russian secret service in
1903. Its central notion, that a secret Jewish cabal governs the West, is not a
“critique” of policy; it was the systematic application at the beginning of the
media age of the superstition that had justified centuries of expulsion and
murder before it. Such delirium belongs not in the mouth of a statesman but in
the mouth of an unwashed man screaming on a subway car. And yet here it was,
spoken—and unchallenged—on one of the most famous “conservative” broadcasts in
America.
This is nothing new from Carlson, at least since he had
to make his own way following his defenestration by Rupert Murdoch two years
ago. His gambit, his way of separating himself from the crowd of people on the
right who dominate the political podcast universe, has been to praise and
amplify the opinions of pseudo-scholars with scandalous views—for example, that
Winston Churchill was the true villain of World War II rather than Hitler and
Tojo.
That effort is explicitly anti-institutional; it suggests
that the scholars who work at think tanks and the politicians and political
institutions who echo them have been corrupted by their complicity with liberal
narratives. One might expect those institutions to fight back against his
slanders. But no: Ever since the ultimate anti-institutionalist, Donald Trump,
rose to power, the rhetorical emphasis of those wanting to ride his wave has
been on echoing his disdain for the status quo on the right and seeking to
channel and use it. And so it has been for the Heritage Foundation under the
guidance of its president since 2021, Kevin Roberts. He has looked upon this
desecration of his own purpose and has chosen to join in. After Fuentes’s
appearance, Roberts dismissed Carlson’s critics as “globalists” and
congratulated himself for resisting “cancel culture.” This is not the
preservation of heritage, or of Heritage. It is its profanation.
In his defense of Carlson, Roberts claimed that
“Christians can critique the State of Israel without being anti-Semitic” and
that “cancelling” men like Fuentes is not the answer. The implication was
plain: that Carlson’s indulgence of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories was merely
“criticism” that brave Christians must be free to make. This is sophistry of
the cheapest kind. To conflate the world’s oldest hatred with legitimate debate
is not courage; it is moral illiteracy. Roberts imagines himself defending Christian
conscience, but what he has defended instead is the pursuit of populist market
share dressed as piety. He fears not God but the disapproval of the
anti-Semitic mob; he is siding with the money changers.
Having conflated rabid anti-Semitic fantasy with
legitimate criticism of Israel, he then went on to cheapen the very meaning of
America itself. “When it serves the interest of the United States to cooperate
with Israel and other allies, we should do so,” he declared, “but when it
doesn’t, conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any
foreign government.” In his telling, even Israel’s survival—and by extension,
the fate of any ally bound to America by shared principle—is a question of utility,
not duty. He would have the republic bind itself to others only when the
balance sheet shows immediate gain, as though freedom were a commodity and not
a calling, as though the defense of civilization were merely a matter of
convenience. The faith that built America demanded more. It bound belief to
duty, conscience to sacrifice, and power to principle. America’s heritage is
not isolationist, transactional, or tribal. It is covenantal. Its purpose was
never to exist for itself alone, but to stand as a beacon for all free
nations—a republic born of a vision of man himself. It was this conviction—that
the moral law binds nations no less than men—that guided Roosevelt, Kennedy,
and Reagan in their defense of liberty as a universal trust rather than a provincial
interest.
As Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed in his “Four Freedoms”
address, the hope of America was a world “founded upon four essential human
freedoms… everywhere in the world.” Two decades later, John F. Kennedy pledged
that America would “pay any price, bear any burden…to assure the survival and
success of liberty.” That burden was not merely strategic but moral—the price
of belief in the universality of human dignity. And a generation after him,
Ronald Reagan warned that “freedom is a fragile thing…never more than one
generation away from extinction.”
“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” the Founders
declared. Human dignity is not granted by rulers but endowed by the Creator;
liberty and equality before the law are not privileges of birth or blood but
the birthright of all mankind. In that conviction lay the moral genius of the
Republic—that what is true for a man in Washington is true for a man in Warsaw,
or in Tokyo, or in Jerusalem. And it was this same faith that enabled them, in
time, to transform their enemies into their dearest allies.
After 1945, the United States faced the populations of
two of history’s most formidable adversaries of moral order: Germany and Japan.
Both had waged total war against the free world and had been defeated. Instead
of their rising again as vengeful, nuclear-armed powers, America rebuilt them,
not as clients but as partners. It offered bread where the Great Powers had
demanded tribute after the First World War. It turned vengeance into virtue.
That act of magnanimity was not only wise; it was profoundly Christian, the
Sermon on the Mount rendered in statecraft. America did not merely win a war;
it won the peace by practicing the faith that Roberts now misrepresents.
The proof of that triumph lies before us. Today, as
Russian imperialism revives and the Chinese Communist Party arms itself for
confrontation, those same former enemies have become America’s most steadfast
allies—rearming not against America, but in defense of her ideals and the moral
order she built. The flags once lowered before the Stars and Stripes now rise
beside it. The powers once sworn to her destruction now stand ready to defend
the very truths her Founders called self-evident. This is the final vindication
of the American creed: that liberty, once given form in law and belief, can
redeem even those who once sought to destroy it, and that nations built upon
faith in the dignity of man can outlast empires built upon fear.
Japan became the keystone of liberty in the Pacific,
Germany the anchor of democracy on the European continent. Together they became
pillars of an order that kept the peace for nearly 80 years. And America did it
again during the Cold War—nurturing fledgling democracies, sustaining allies
under siege, and extending the covenant of freedom to nations that had never
known it. It is this heritage—the moral order bought with faith, blood, and
sacrifice—that Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation seeks to supplant in
the name of his friendship with Tucker Carlson. To proclaim loyalty to “Christ
first and America always,” as Roberts did, while defending men who sneer at
both Judaism and democracy is not a matter of faith but an example of idolatry.
***
The vision of Roberts, Carlson, and Fuentes is not merely
ahistorical or strategically bankrupt. It is blasphemous. It desecrates the
very memory it pretends to defend. What earlier generations built through
faith, blood, and sacrifice, Carlson and his camp followers are defacing in the
name of false virtue. The moral order that bound liberty to restraint and duty
to power is being broken apart—not by enemies at the gate, but by vandals
within the walls.
And in that defacement lies the greater peril. America is
not yet failing, but it is being betrayed by those who claim to defend it and
by those who destroy it while mouthing its name. Today, a chorus of voices on
left and right declares its inheritance broken. Some say that is demonstrated
by American support for Israel because the Jewish state does not properly
reflect their own understanding of liberal democratic values. Others say
liberal democracy itself is the problem: too weak, too sentimental, too slow
for a world of rising civilizational conflict.
The poison spreads from every direction. Democratic
Representative Ilhan Omar once declared: “I want to talk about the political
influence in this country that says it is OK for people to push for allegiance
to a foreign country.” This was another recasting of that ancient slander, the
claim that Jewish citizens and their allies are less American, that loyalty to
Israel corrupts the Republic from within.
But what was once confined to the left’s fever swamps has
now begun seeping into the right’s sanctuaries. Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes
repeat almost word for word what Omar once insinuated: that “Zionist Jews”
dictate American policy and hold the nation hostage. Even Kevin Roberts, who
pretends to abhor anti-Semitism, defends the men who preach it—and in doing so
lends credence to their lies. He insists that Christians have a right to
“criticize Israel,” as though anyone holds to a doctrine that says Israel
cannot be criticized. But the criticism he shelters is not of Israeli policy
but of its supposed secret exercise of power: the ancient fantasy that Jews
corrupt democracy and bend nations to their own ends.
What Roberts calls “the vile ideas of the left” have
become the lingua franca of this new “right.” The conspiracy has changed its
costume, but not its creed. The radicals who shout loudest about treason to the
nation have themselves become mouthpieces for its enemies. The dialectic of
grievance, the politics of victimhood, the scapegoating of Jews and
“globalists”—all were spoken long ago on the campuses that the podcast right
claims to despise.
Founded to preserve the principles that won the Cold War
and rebuilt the free world, the Heritage Foundation now labors to unmake them.
Roberts speaks the language of patriotism but rejects its substance—advancing
ideas and would-be leaders who would make America weaker, lonelier, and more
vulnerable to the forces that openly despise her. When America forgets that her
strength lies in fidelity to the values that made her great, she does not find
safety in retreat. She invites defeat. Its leaders preach “America First,” yet
the policies they advance would leave America last—abandoned by allies,
emboldening enemies, and unmoored from the moral purpose that once bound
liberty to restraint.
If America owes allegiance only to herself, then every
sacrifice made in Europe and Asia and in the long vigilance of the Cold War was
a mistake. Walk the cliffs of Normandy, and you will see the covenant written
in marble and grass—the white crosses and Stars of David standing in their
thousands, row upon row, facing the sea they crossed to free. The same order
stretches across the Ardennes, across Anzio and Manila—fields of faith and duty
where the living made a vow to the dead. Those who fell there did not die for
profit or power. They died for a moral order carved into stone and sanctified
in blood—the order that made the West worth defending. This is the moral
inheritance of the Judeo-Christian tradition. It forged liberal democracy not
as an abstraction, but as a way of life: a covenant between faith and freedom,
duty and mercy. If America forgets this, the West will follow—and if the West
forgets, freedom itself will fade from the earth. And when that happens, it
will not be because the wolves were strong, but because the shepherds lost
their faith.
This is not a quarrel within conservatism. It is a
quarrel between those who still believe in civilization and those who would
sell it for applause. The battle now is the oldest of all: between memory and
amnesia. The Heritage Foundation was once built to defend the first against the
second. Under Roberts, it is threatening to embody the reversal.
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