“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” ― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up
It was always only a matter of time: MAGA, with its racial purity obsession and America First tendencies, was always the strangest of bedfellows with the Miriam Adelson wing of the Trump administration. Shared Islamophobia, panic about sharia law coming to the local school board, and state harassment and deportation of pro-Palestinian professors, students and writers could only hold it together for so long.
The irreconcilable differences are exploding into the open at the Heritage Foundation, a formerly mainstream Republican policy shop that went all in for Trumpism and is now being accused of helping mainstream one of America’s coarsest Nazi sympathizers.
Last week, Tucker Carlson aired a long interview with Nick Fuentes, the young leader of the “Groyper” wing of the new right. With Carlson at his studio in Maine, Fuentes was more restrained than usual (he’s compared Jews killed in the Holocaust to “cookies baked in an oven” and has said “organized Jewry” is working to control banks, media and government). Carlson did not quiz him on his past statements. He did respond with gentle disagreement a few times, suggesting that as a multiracial and multiethnic nation, Americans should not be segmented into self-interested identity groups, as Fuentes was arguing. Of course, Tucker has spent a lot of his own media capital doing just that – hosting Darryl Cooper, a Nazi apologist whom he referred to as the “best and most honest popular historian in the United States” on his podcast, for example.)
The outrage (fake or real?) was swift. Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal editorial board issued an op-ed about the fracas with the headline “The New Right’s Antisemites” – as if they were only just waking up to the fact that their ethnonationalists could not long co-exist with non-white non-Christian Americans. Florida Rep. Randy Fine (R-FLL) called Carlson “the most dangerous anti-Semite in America” and accused him of leading a “modern-day Hitler Youth.” Fine also cancelled a planned event with Heritage.
In Washington, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts voiced big support for Tucker Carlson in a tweeted video statement. “Conservatives should feel no obligation to support any foreign government” when such support doesn’t serve American interests, he said. “My loyalty as a Christian and an American is to Christ first and America always.” He then called out pressure from “the globalist class” – a phrase often seen as referencing Jews.
The video statement landed like the proverbial turd in the swimming pool. Lawyer Mark Goldfeder, who is Jewish, announced he was resigning from the Foundation’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism. “I cannot serve under someone who thinks Nazis are worth debating,” Goldfeder wrote.
Roberts’ chief of staff, Ryan Neuhaus, then doubled down, calling out Heritage dissidents who were criticizing his boss online and accusing those who expressed outrage at Carlson’s softball interview of “virtue signaling.” Roberts then abruptly deployed Neuhaus to a different office – a wing of the Heritage foundation that happens to be run by a white Christian nationalist with open anti-Jewish inclinations of his own.
Scott Yenor is a misogynist superfreak from the great state of Idaho who entered the national MAGA mainstream via the odious hatchery of the Claremont Institute. He was forced to resign from a university board in Florida earlier this year after reports of his past statements about American Jews, including that they shouldn’t be considered for national leadership. The batshittery doesn’t end there. Yenor has advocated that the medical and legal professions ban women because they are “medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome.” He is also a founding member of a secret society of prominent white Christian nationalist men planning for what they call a “national divorce.”
None of that was a hindrance to getting hired at Heritage. Last month, Yenor crowed on Twitter about his new job as Director of the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies. While Neuhaus has since announced he is resigning from Heritage altogether, Yenor remains burrowed in at Simon Center, which the foundation’s website calls “the center that safeguards the heritage of Heritage … dedicated to preserving the intellectual and moral underpinnings of our nation’s Founding.”
None of this is surprising. Heritage Foundation founder, political strategist Paul Weyrich, was one of the most effective and extremist religious zealots to operate in American politics in the last century. Kevin Roberts is an ideal inheritor of that vision. Before coming to DC, he ran a Catholic university in Wyoming that produced righty culture warrior kids who would complain to local shops about the impropriety of advertising bras on mannequins (“upsetting to male students”) and who held anti-LGBTQ “traditional marriage picnics.”
This ugly war is breaking out all over. As John Ganz noticed in his essay Who Will Win the GOP Civil War? when right wing radio screamer Mark Levin criticized Fuentes, Tucker, and Candace Owens in a recent rant about their antisemitism, he sounded “less bombastic than shrill. The fact is, Levin seems nervous. And he should be. The momentum is not on their side. Go on YouTube and look at the comments. They are all anti-Israel or anti-Semitic. “
Russ Vought’s wife and Heritage VP of communications Mary Grace Vought – whose side hustle with a Texan out in Oklahoma we recounted in a recent episode of the Freakshow – took time out of whatever Beltway white Christian nationalist hypocrites do on Sundays to issue a tweet from her personal account. No, the policy tank was not about to cancel Roberts – not yet anyway: “Online rumors about a recent meeting of the Heritage Board of Trustees are completely baseless,” she announced.
Obviously those of us revolted by Project 2025 relish this spectacle. Anyone who has been paying any attention to the “no enemies to the right” Nazified big tent of American conservatism could not have predicted any other outcome. But it is also terrifying. To get a sense of sensibility, read this defense of young racist Paul Ingrassia today. The brain trust of the MAGA movement has always flirted with antisemitism – Bronze Age Pervert for example, whose revolting book is in the back pocket of most young Trumpist staffers on the Hill, is explicitly anti-Jewish. Most of the eugenicists, ethnonationalists, and trad Caths who comprise the MAGA movement’s intellectual core are all-in for racial and religious purity.
Now, these highbrow men with dirty fascist theories are angry about a midwestern rube who talks rough getting mainstreamed. Perhaps they’re jealous.
Laura Fields is a political scientist and author of the new book, Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right. Fields told me:
It was only a matter of time until far-right antisemitism became a real issue for them. For years now people across the MAGA New Right, including Yoram Hazony, have been arguing and perhaps pretending that antisemitism is really a problem of the left. Meanwhile, again and again, influential young people and staffers on the New Right – in the chats and on X and beyond – keep being exposed for their gross antisemitic humor or use of Nazi symbology, and the leaders of the movement kept silent (the important exception here is Sohrab Ahmari, who proves the rule). Now Kevin Roberts has gone too far. But he and others have been giving cover to the extreism – and not just antisemitism but also misogyny, homophobic bigotry, and at times racism – for many years now.
AUTHOR NOTE: I will be continuing the conversation with Laura Fields on Substack Live Thursday, November 6 at 11 AM Eastern time. You won’t want to miss it.
Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.
Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow
