Nearly 1,500 new copies of The Heritage Guide to the Constitution were supposed to be handed out at the Federalist Society’s annual convention. The book had taken four years to produce. More than 150 judges, lawyers and scholars had contributed, Justice Samuel Alito had written the preface, and nearly 100 of those contributors were expected to gather for a mass signing.¹
Then the calls began.
People who had helped write the book no longer wanted to sit behind a table with the Heritage Foundation’s name in front of them. The signing was canceled—not because anyone had discovered a constitutional error, but because one short video by Heritage president Kevin Roberts had made some of the country’s leading conservative lawyers unwilling to be seen celebrating a book they had helped create.
“The Heritage brand, once iconic, instantly became toxic,” constitutional-law professor Josh Blackman later wrote in his resignation letter.¹
The video was Roberts’s response to Tucker Carlson’s remarkably friendly interview with Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist and Holocaust denier who has praised Hitler and built a large following among angry young men. Roberts called Carlson a friend, attacked the “venomous coalition” trying to cancel him and said conservatives should spend more time fighting the left than attacking people on their own side.²
Roberts later apologized for some of that language and called Fuentes an “evil person.” But when he met with Heritage employees, he also explained what he’d been trying to accomplish. Fuentes had attracted an audience of several million people, Roberts said, and at least some of them might still be converted to mainstream conservatism.²