The Heritage Foundation Implodes

National Review Online

Tuesday, December 23, 2025

 

In an email to staff after the mass departure of Heritage Foundation policy analysts over the weekend, the think tank’s president, Kevin Roberts, touted what he calls “Heritage 2.0.”

 

Anyone vested in the health of the conservative movement should spare a thought for Heritage 1.0; the work of Ed Feulner, Ed Meese, and countless others who have made Heritage a pillar of conservative policy thought grounded in principle and American ideals. That Heritage has, to all appearances, been truly driven into the ground.

 

Roberts made it his mission upon assuming leadership of the organization to cozy up to Tucker Carlson and his faction of the “new right,” and then took it too far in a reflexive video defense of Carlson’s interview with white nationalist Nick Fuentes. The Roberts statement was substantively indefensible and completely tone-deaf; Carlson’s critics were supposedly a “venomous coalition” bent on “sowing division.” This performance prompted notable figures such as Chris DeMuth and Steve Moore to immediately leave.

 

Roberts undertook a semi-apology tour but never took down the video; it has more than 24 million views as of this writing. Conservatives associated with the institution began to despair of any true turnabout — or new leadership — and started to leave. Three board members have now quit, including Robert P. George. The mass defection over the weekend involved the legal and economic departments’ leaving almost in their entirety. And yesterday brought more resignations, as Heritage stalwarts Hans von Spakovsky and Cully Stimson called it quits.

 

A Heritage Foundation that was once synonymous with free markets, the rule of law, and a strong national defense has, to a large extent, abandoned or downgraded those things in pursuit of newer, populist ideological fashions in an apparent finger-in-the-wind attempt to stay in the good graces of the power brokers of the new right. (At the same time, Roberts alienated the Trump campaign last year by persisting in portraying Project 2025 as the Trump 2.0 playbook, despite the Trump team’s pleas for Heritage to stop.)

 

A think tank may need to shift its emphasis and tone to meet the temper of the times, but once it simply tries to get in front of the latest parade, it has become a quasi-political organization rather than an intellectual enterprise.

 

Many of the defectors from this weekend are landing at Advancing American Freedom, the Mike Pence–led organization that is unbendingly committed to markets, constitutionalism, traditional values, and peace through strength — and has no truck with antisemitism. AAF has already proved it is willing to defend these ideals even in foul political weather. One hopes that more people, as they see parts of the right succumb to moneygrubbing pandering and bizarre obsessions, will realize the importance of such principled advocacy.

 

We wish AAF and all the various refugees from Heritage the very best in defending a conservatism absolutely essential to America’s continued greatness. As Ed Feulner loved to say, “Onward!”