The Heritage Foundation was once the cerebral cortex of the American Right. For decades, it was the place where guys in bow ties wrote 900-page white papers on enterprise zones and missile defense systems, confident that Ronald Reagan would read the executive summary and change the world. It was a factory for “ideas”—dry, often heartless, but logically consistent ideas that formed the bedrock of a coherent political philosophy.1
Today, the Heritage Foundation is less a think tank and more a Trump fan blog with a 501(c)(3) tax status.
The transformation is now complete. The institution that once prided itself on being the “intellectual backbone” of conservatism has dissolved into a gelatinous puddle of MAGA subservience, a process that culminated this week in a staff revolt so humiliating it would make a college student government blush.2 The catalyst? Heritage President Kevin Roberts’s decision to defend Tucker Carlson’s friendly sit-down with Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist and Holocaust minimizer who thinks the wrong side won World War II.3
When the backlash hit—because apparently, even in 2025, “hanging out with Nazis” is still a resume stain—Roberts offered a defense that belongs in the pantheon of bad excuses.4 He claimed he “didn’t know much” about Fuentes.5 This is the president of the premier conservative research organization in Washington, D.C., admitting he is unaware of the most prominent white nationalist in the country. It is like a heart surgeon announcing in the middle of a bypass that he is actually a bit squeamish about blood.
This is not an accident; it is a lobotomy.
For the last few years, Heritage has been engaged in a desperate, flailing attempt to remain relevant in a party that no longer cares about policy.6 They have pivoted from the free-market gospel of the Reagan era to a bewildering economic nationalism that adjusts its “principles” in real-time based on Donald Trump’s mood swings. When Trump hated tariffs, Heritage hated tariffs. When Trump loved tariffs, Heritage suddenly discovered the virtues of protectionism. When Trump liked NATO, Heritage was hawkish. When Trump decided NATO was a racket, Heritage started publishing papers on “restraint.”
They are not leading the movement; they are chasing it. They are a GPS system that simply reroutes every time the driver drives off a cliff, whispering “recalculating” while the car plummets.
The meltdown over the Carlson-Fuentes affair exposes the rot at the core of this new ecosystem. Roberts tried to play the “anti-cancel culture” card, arguing that we shouldn’t “police” our friends.7 But there is a difference between refusing to cancel a friend for a bad tweet and refusing to condemn a friend for platforming a guy who thinks the Holocaust was a cookie-baking accident. By failing to draw that line, Roberts revealed that Heritage no longer has red lines. It only has a bottom line: do not anger the base.
This is the “brain dead” state of the modern conservative intellectual movement. As Jonathan Chait and others have noted, the ecosystem has decayed into a personality cult where the only currency is loyalty. There are no “ideas” anymore, only rationalizations.
Look at the trajectory of pundits like Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist. In 2016, she was a skeptic, analyzing Trump with a critical eye. Today, she is a praise singer, reversing herself into a pretzel to defend the indefensible. The incentives are clear: if you critique the Dear Leader, you are exiled. You are sent to the Siberian wastes of The Bulwark or The Dispatch, or worse, you end up writing op-eds for the New York Times as the “sane conservative” that liberals read to feel better about themselves.
Inside the MAGA media bubble, the dominant mode is deflection and omission. No one offers serious defenses of Trump’s abuses or policy whiplash because there are no serious defenses. You cannot construct a logical argument for a man who governs by impulse. So instead, they pivot. They talk about “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” They talk about the “Deep State.” They talk about anything except the reality staring them in the face.
The result is a movement that is terrified of its own audience. Heritage cannot condemn Fuentes because they know a significant chunk of their donor base is listening to Tucker Carlson and nodding along. They cannot criticize Trump’s incoherence because they know the base views incoherence as “authenticity.” They have outsourced their worldview to whatever Donald Trump happens to blurt out on a given afternoon, leaving them scrambling to write a white paper justifying it by the evening news.
The Heritage Foundation used to shape the presidency.8 Now, it is just another prop in the reality show, a set piece designed to give the veneer of seriousness to a movement that burned its library card years ago. The “ideas factory” is closed. The lights are off. And the only thing coming off the assembly line is a rubber stamp.
The Part They Hope You Miss
The most dangerous part of this collapse is not the bigotry, but the incompetence. When you purge your experts because they aren’t “loyal” enough, and you replace them with hacks who are willing to defend white nationalists, you lose the ability to govern. Heritage is currently staffing up for “Project 2025,” the blueprint for the next Trump administration.9 If these are the people vetting the resumes—people who “don’t know” who Nick Fuentes is—then the next administration won’t just be malicious; it will be dangerously inept. They are building a government of yes-men who are too busy checking the polls to check the background of the guy they just hired to run the nuclear arsenal.