Hey On The Right readers. We’ve got something really exciting today: an insider-informed look at the chaos consuming the conservative movement.
The right’s ongoing fight over antisemitism, set off by Tucker Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes, has escalated into a full-blown civil war within its halls of power. No place has been more affected than the Heritage Foundation, the leading MAGA think tank that convened Project 2025. Its president, Kevin Roberts, released a video on October 30 defending Tucker and his platforming of Fuentes — leading to weeks of uproar and more than one prominent resignation from Heritage and its board.
For a new story this week, I spoke with a Heritage insider, one with intimate knowledge of its upper echelons, about everything that’s happening. This source is, to my knowledge, the most significant Heritage insider to speak up since the current crisis at the organization began. And they painted a dire picture of the internal culture of the organization, suggesting that there was a cultural “rot” that leadership had allowed to flourish in which some people felt comfortable saying “openly misogynistic and racist things.”
What follows is an adapted version of my reporting, as well as my analysis as to how this fits into the broader culture of the American right — one in which many conversations once happening behind closed doors are now happening publicly. Hope you find it interesting!
My source is quite familiar with both Kevin Roberts and Heritage’s upper echelons; were I to publish their name, there is a very real chance their career would be over. But nonetheless, they felt the need to speak out, so we’re not disclosing their name in order to protect them from retaliation.
The source had only kind words for Roberts as a person — “nothing but a gentleman” — and professed deep appreciation for the organization Roberts leads and its importance for the American right.
“If I didn’t care about Heritage,” they said, “I would not be doing this at all.”
But they were deeply alarmed at what had happened to the place, warning of extremist “counter-culture thinking [that] has seeped in” among a portion (though not all) of the staff. While the source believes leadership does not share these staffers’ politics, they believe it has created a climate of permissiveness, allowing a “rot” to set in.
“My message to Kevin [has been that] I know that you don’t believe these things that have been going around the building,” the source said. “But he never had the courage to disavow it, to nip it in the bud when he could have.”
To substantiate their claims, the source described witnessing several instances of Heritage personnel “being openly misogynistic and racist” in their presence. These include Heritage staff using racially derogatory language about a Black employee behind their back and referring to the 19th Amendment (which granted women the right to vote) as the cause of American society’s downfall.
But, perhaps their most striking recollection was a conversation with a donor who, during a discussion about liberal allegations of racism against the right, admitted to actually holding racist views — but keeping them a secret in public.
Heritage, for its part, describes the claims as “defamatory," asserting that “Heritage has zero tolerance for racism” and threatening Vox with legal action.
“We’re used to Leftist lunatics spewing lies about conservatives, so it’s unsurprising that the so-called source is laundering this gossip through a far-Left outlet like Vox,” the organization said in its statement.
Yet, there are several independent reasons to believe that the source’s claims of “rot” are credible.
First, evidence of toleration for hidden bigotry can be seen in Heritage’s treatment of EJ Antoni, its current chief economist.
Earlier this year, after the Trump administration nominated Antoni to be the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, CNN uncovered damning evidence that Antoni had maintained an anonymous Twitter account that posted “sexually degrading attacks on Kamala Harris [and] derogatory remarks about gay people.” The White House withdrew Antoni’s nomination after the article’s publication.
Yet, Antoni maintained his position at Heritage. He is currently listed on its website as “the Chief Economist, and Richard Aster Fellow, in The Heritage Foundation’s Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget” and last published an article on Heritage’s website under that title on November 4 — well over a month after his withdrawal.
There is also public evidence of Heritage hires engaging in some of the specific conduct alleged by the source. In 2023, Heritage brought on John McEntee — a key Trump ally who worked on personnel issues — to help construct Project 2025’s database of staffers for a future GOP administration. The next year, McEntee publicly “joked” about revoking women’s right to vote in a post on X.
And other Heritage insiders have made related complaints after Roberts’s public defense of Carlson. Last Friday, professor Adam Mossoff, a visiting fellow at Heritage, released a letter of resignation addressed to Roberts in which Mossoff accuses him of tolerating rising extremism in the right’s ranks.
“Antisemitism is just the tip of the spear of a collectivist and nihilist ideology that seeks the destruction of Western Civilization. Your videos and statements have made it clear that we embrace as ‘friends’ those who embrace and proselytize these evil ideas under the guise of a big tent on the right in which self-proclaimed conservatives can have friendly and cheery conversations with modern Nazis,” Mossoff wrote.
“It is one thing for you to make this choice as an individual, but you have made this choice for the Heritage Foundation," he continued.
The quiet part out loud
For all its notable issues, it is important not to treat Heritage in isolation. When you spend enough time talking with people on the broader right, it becomes clear that the line between the hard right and the mainstream has long been more porous than many think. It is quite common for someone to hold some provocative beliefs, especially on issues of identity and bigotry, that they do not wish to share publicly.
It is unusual — but not unheard of — for such a person to openly identify their own views as “racist” or “sexist.” What’s more common is a sense that certain “truths” are unsayable in public, because anyone who offered them would risk professional or personal consequences from a mainstream in hock to leftist PC or “woke” sentiments.
What exactly those “unsayable truths” are is a subject on which people across the right disagree among themselves. Take race, for example. There is a deep divide between those who blame persistent inequalities on alleged deficiencies in Black culture and those who assert that genetics mean Black people are more likely to have low IQs.
The point is not that all conservatives hold one of those two views on the causes of racial inequality or any other similar issue. The American right is a broad and heterogeneous movement, many of whom would reject both of the above views in private and in public.
Rather, the point is that these are normalized debates inside broader conservative spaces, the sorts of things that people employed at places like Heritage feel they can argue with each other about in safe spaces. For this reason, a real slice of the right’s internal dialogue — not close to all of it, but certainly a meaningful part — consists of debating the merits of ideas that outsiders might reasonably describe as bigoted.
Over the course of the Trump era, these internal debates have breached containment. Ideas once unsayable publicly becoming things that influential voices on the right freely and openly discuss. As recently as 2013, theorizing about the inherently lower IQ of Latino immigrants would get you fired from Heritage; today, such views are openly aired in the public debate. The president himself has talked about the “bad genes” of murderous undocumented immigrants.
Many right-wingers acknowledge that the dam is breaking. In a recent essay, writer Helen Andrews — who has a history of pushing boundaries on race — dubiously argued that many of the ills of the modern American workplace can be blamed on women’s mass participation in it. Near its conclusion, Andrews describes feeling trepidation about airing her true views:
In September, I gave a speech at the National Conservatism conference along the lines of the essay above. I was apprehensive about putting forward the Great Feminization thesis in such a public forum. It is still controversial, even in conservative circles, to say that there are too many women in a given field or that women in large numbers can transform institutions beyond recognition in ways that make them cease to function well. I made sure to express my argument in the most neutral way possible. To my surprise, the response was overwhelming. Within a few weeks, the video of the speech had gotten over 100,000 views on YouTube and become one of the most viewed speeches in the history of the National Conservatism conference.
You can see, in Andrews’s comment, exactly the private-conversation-going-public effect that I’m describing. Views that she once aired privately in conservative circles, controversial even there, are now getting positive attention in public. Just recently, Andrews appeared on the New York Times’ Interesting Times podcast to make her case — in an episode initially titled “Did Women Ruin the Workplace?”
