This Is How the Right Dies

This moment marks yet another turning point of the past 2 years.

Not just for the Heritage Foundation, but for the entire American conservative movement.

For decades, Heritage represented the intellectual spine of the right. It was built by men and women who believed in faith, freedom, and the moral clarity that came with knowing the difference between good and evil.

It was the home of Reagan conservatives, of Cold War hawks, of those who understood that America’s strength came not from isolation but from the alliances and principles that made Western civilization worth defending in the first place.

That Heritage now finds itself defending Tucker Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes, a man who has praised Hitler, denied the Holocaust, and mocked Jewish suffering, is a symptom of a moral rot spreading through the American right.

Kevin Roberts says, “Christ first, then America always.” He frames this as courage, as standing up to “the globalist class.” But listen closely to what he’s actually saying. It's not faith or patriotism. It's the language of power cloaked in religion and stripped of any guardrails.

It is also deeply dishonest.

Nobody is trying to “cancel Christians” for criticizing Israel. Nobody has ever said that disagreeing with Israeli policy makes someone an antisemite, any more than disagreeing with President Trump makes you less of a patriot.

The issue is when you charitably host and defend literal Jew-haters, people who call Jews “vermin” and say the Holocaust didn’t happen, and then pretend that doing so is a defense of free speech.

Roberts says Heritage “won’t cancel our own people.” But that phrase, “our own people,” is doing a lot of work here. Because who exactly does that include now? Are neo-Nazis now “our people”? Is Nick Fuentes, a man who preaches venomous hate against Jews, women, and Black Americans, now under the Heritage tent?

The conservative movement once knew how to draw lines. William F. Buckley exiled the John Birch Society from the mainstream right when it crossed into conspiracy and antisemitism. Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an evil empire because he understood that evil is not relative. It must be named and it must be confronted.

Now, men like Kevin Roberts call evil a “debate partner.”

He claims “we challenge those ideas in debate.” Debate what, exactly? Whether Jews are subhuman? Whether the Holocaust happened? Whether women belong in the kitchen? Whether slavery was good for the South?

No serious moral movement treats those questions as intellectual exercises. They are disqualifying.

What makes this moment so dangerous is the inversion of moral hierarchy. People like Roberts now talk about “America First,” but their version of America First is really America Last. It’s the same ideological poison that has corrupted the far right across the world. A nihilistic nationalism that loves the idea of America but hates what actually made it great.

Heritage was supposed to stand for something higher. It was supposed to be where ideas were tested against truth, not where truth was sacrificed for loyalty.

The old conservative movement believed that Western civilization had moral foundations, Judeo-Christian ones, that bound it to justice, decency, and moral clarity. The new movement believes in nothing but itself.

Roberts says he’s defending Tucker Carlson because “the left is the real enemy.” But what he’s doing, and what Carlson and Fuentes are doing, is far more corrosive to conservatism than anything the left could accomplish. The left cannot destroy the moral integrity of the American right. Only the right can do that.

And that is exactly what is happening.

When the leader of Heritage cannot bring himself to say that Nick Fuentes’ ideology is evil, when he cannot look his audience in the eye and say that Jews are not the problem, then something fundamental has broken.

If this is what “America First” has become, then the American conservative movement has entered its own exile.

Because any movement that cannot tell the difference between faith and fanaticism, between patriotism and paranoia, between freedom and hate, is a movement that no longer knows what it is defending.

And if that’s the future of Heritage, it’s not cancel culture that will destroy it.

It is itself.