He decided who was loyal, who was weak and who was a traitor, sometimes changing his mind before the end of the week.
A think tank can’t resolve its contradictions that way. Eventually it has to decide what it believes, explain why it believes it and accept that some people won’t come along.
Heritage also needed something Trump already possessed: an audience. The young men Roberts hoped to convert weren’t spending their evenings reading Heritage policy papers. They were watching Carlson, Fuentes and a growing collection of online personalities whose influence came from telling them that Washington institutions—including conservative ones—were corrupt, cowardly and hopelessly out of touch.
The bargain with Carlson was therefore badly unequal. Heritage needed his reach far more than Carlson needed its economists, lawyers or constitutional scholars. After Roberts defended him, Carlson continued broadcasting to the same enormous audience while Heritage began losing the people who had supplied much of its professional credibility.
More than a dozen employees eventually departed or were dismissed. The former leaders of Heritage’s legal, economic and data operations, along with members of their staffs, moved to Advancing American Freedom, the organization founded by Mike Pence. The Pence group said it had raised more than eight figures to support the expansion.⁷
Whatever Pence’s own political future, his organization had acquired a considerable portion of the old Heritage operating system.
Fuentes understood the transaction immediately. He described Heritage as the intellectual engine whose ideas became gospel for Republican lawmakers. Now, he boasted, his own Groyper movement was “inside the institutions.”³
Roberts believed Heritage was reaching into the fringe and bringing salvageable young men back toward mainstream conservatism. Fuentes believed the fringe had breached Heritage.
Who was converting whom?
By this summer, Roberts appeared to have won the internal struggle. Many employees who didn’t fit his vision had resigned, been dismissed or quietly departed, while supportive board members and “mission aligned” employees took their places. Roberts told The New York Times Magazine that some of the departed lawyers and economists had wanted to operate Heritage in an “1980s-style way.”
“And it’s good that they’re gone,” he added.⁸
That doesn’t mean Heritage is collapsing. It means the civil war may have ended with Roberts in charge of a different institution.
His appearance this spring at a dinner honoring paleoconservative historian Paul Gottfried suggests that the change was deliberate rather than merely the residue of a badly handled controversy. Roberts called conservative gatekeeping “stupid” and a “fool’s errand,” praised Gottfried as “one of the sages of our age” and promised to help expand the reach of Chronicles, a magazine that has published writers accused of white-supremacist and neo-Confederate sympathies.⁹
The message was difficult to miss. People and institutions once exiled from respectable conservatism were no longer necessarily outside the gate. Heritage’s new purpose was to bring them into a larger coalition—or at least to stop the old establishment from deciding that they didn’t belong.
That brings us back to Vance and the question Heritage set out to answer.
At Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest, after days of fighting over Carlson, Fuentes, antisemitism and the future of the movement, Vance announced that he hadn’t brought “a list of conservatives to denounce or to de-platform.” Carlson described the underlying struggle more bluntly: people were wondering “who gets the machinery when the president exits the scene.”⁶
Vance’s answer is to inherit the coalition without drawing its borders. He may eventually inherit Trump’s candidacy, while Carlson retains much of the audience and the power to tell that audience who has betrayed America First.