The Patriot Post® · Mike Pence Is Enlisting Heritage Vets

Politics is like an ocean — sometimes calm but also unleashing the occasional rogue wave that takes out a stalwart ship. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank and friend of The Patriot Post, has just been hit by a rogue wave.

Heritage is behind Project 2025, which we in our humble shop have defended vigorously. However, the organization has also wandered into the burgeoning Republican civil war.

Heritage President Kevin Roberts stepped on a virtual land mine back in October when he waded into the controversy over Tucker Carlson’s interview with white supremacist Nick Fuentes, stating that he would not be canceling Carlson even though he does not agree or stand with the likes of Fuentes, whom Carlson made look like a person with palatable ideas.

As our Nate Jackson explained, “Marginalizing people can make them extremists. Roberts said it ‘makes those ideas, lamentably and ironically, almost more cachet,’ particularly among ‘disaffected young men.’” However, Jackson added, “The ideas of a movement are different. Telling Nick Fuentes your hate-filled identity politics have no part with our Liberty movement is not cancel culture. It’s the stewardship of our movement.”

Roberts did apologize but refused to take down his video. This has since caused a shift at Heritage. Many members of the think tank have left as part of the fallout of Roberts’s video and perceived changes in priorities.

According to the editors of National Review, “A Heritage Foundation that was once synonymous with free markets, the rule of law, and a strong national defense has, to a large extent, abandoned or downgraded those things in pursuit of newer, populist ideological fashions in an apparent finger-in-the-wind attempt to stay in the good graces of the power brokers of the new right.”

The latest resignations include three board members and legal fellows Cully Stimson and Hans von Spakovsky. John Malcolm, former head of the Meese Center — the foundation’s legal and judicial studies center — is leaving and taking seven of his staff members with him.

Malcolm told The Wall Street Journal, “After Kevin Roberts’s video, I had several judges, academics, and prominent practitioners come up to me, personal friends of mine, who said ‘we love you, we love the Meese Center, but we’re not going to do anything with the Heritage Foundation in the future. The Kevin Roberts video was a seminal moment inside the organization.”

For its part, Heritage has viewed the staff departures as defections and disloyalty. Roberts told staffers in an email, “We wish them well, though the manner of their departures speaks volumes.” Heritage Chief Advancement Officer Andrew Olivastro stated, “Our mission is unchanged, and our leadership is strong and decisive. Heritage has always welcomed debate, but alignment on mission and loyalty to the institution are non-negotiable. A handful of staff chose a different path — some through disruption, others through disloyalty.”

Interestingly enough, many of the departing Heritage staff members are landing at another think tank: Mike Pence’s Advancing American Freedom. Pence, the vice president during Donald Trump’s first term, is a Christian conservative leader who was much maligned by Trump when he made the brave and constitutionally correct decision to certify the 2020 election.

Advancing American Freedom is welcoming the homeless Heritage intellectuals with open arms. AAF has a reputation for being consistent in its conservative values and not wholeheartedly bending toward the populism that has changed the Republican Party.

For better or for worse, the conservative movement is at a crossroads. Can we establish a large coalition without compromising core conservative values? Are we a movement that is so big-tent and so finger to the wind that we can no longer really be considered conservative? Are we a movement of no friendly fire, as political pundits like Matt Walsh seem to be? Are we isolationist, or are we “peace through strength”? Can we define our policies and articulate the world we want to help create in a winsome way and have the guts to stand against those ostensibly on the Right who stand for heinous positions like Nick Fuentes?

These questions are being debated in the political arena. One can only hope and pray that The Heritage Foundation can weather the rogue wave that is threatening to capsize it.