The Intellectual and Moral Decline of the American Right

Last month,
Tucker Carlson, the host of
one of the country’s most popular podcasts
,
interviewed Nick Fuentes
, a white-nationalist influencer, for more than two hours. The two men got along famously, and it was little wonder why. Carlson has become a fierce and obsessive critic of Israel; he has interviewed a Holocaust revisionist and said that “Christian Zionists” have “been seized by this brain virus.”
Not everyone on the right was pleased. So in the aftermath of the Carlson-Fuentes conversation, Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation,
put out a video defending Carlson
, a “close friend” of the institution, against the “venomous coalition attacking him.” Heritage’s proper role, according to Roberts, is to “focus on our political adversaries on the left, not attacking our friends on the right.” Roberts said he may disagree with, and even abhor, some of what Fuentes has said, but he made clear that “canceling him is not the answer, either.” What Roberts didn’t anticipate is the backlash he received, from both
within
and
outside
Heritage.
“An old political poison is growing on the new right, led by podcasters and internet opportunists who are preoccupied with the Jews,” the conservative editorial board of
The Wall Street Journal

wrote
. “It is spreading wider and faster than we thought, and it has even found an apologist in Kevin Roberts, president of the venerable Heritage Foundation.”
Roberts, clearly unprepared for the outrage, backtracked, first
blaming
his staff for what happened but eventually admitting, “I made a mistake and I let you down and I let down this institution. And I am sorry for that. Period. Full stop.” Roberts, however, has yet to utter a critical word about Tucker Carlson.
T
he Heritage Foundation
is as good an institution as any in which to study the intellectual and moral decline of the American right. Founded in 1973 by Edwin Feulner, Paul Weyrich, and Joseph Coors, it became the most influential think tank in America in a matter of a few years. Proudly conservative, its
Mandate for Leadership
, published in 1981, served as something of a blueprint for the Reagan administration, which maintained close ties to Heritage.
[
Read: The Nick Fuentes spiral
]
After the Ronald Reagan years the influence of Heritage waned, though it continued to be a potent political and ideological force in politics, and especially within conservatism. (Though it was not my main institutional home, I was affiliated with the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s.)
But in the mid–Barack Obama years, Heritage, to align itself with the Tea Party movement, began to lean hard into populism. A conservative intellectual who is a keen observer of the happenings on the right, and who asked for anonymity in order to speak candidly, told me that in the process, Heritage “changed altogether their basic conception of what the institution’s purpose was.” In place of policy research and advocacy, “they transformed themselves into a kind of grassroots populist group that is fundamentally hostile to the institutions of our government.”

This suited Jim DeMint, a former senator with populist instincts who became president of Heritage in 2013. DeMint built up Heritage Action, a sister institution that engaged in direct lobbying and grassroots organizing, and which provided a legislative scorecard. DeMint also transformed Heritage’s funding model, creating a small-dollar-donor machine that operated by constantly inflaming the anger and fear of its supporters. Heritage dictated populist messaging to its policy teams rather than letting them help policy makers find more effective ways to govern.
In 2015, as Donald Trump began his march toward the Republican presidential nomination, Heritage became even more radicalized.
“The institution came to organize itself around Trump’s person rather than any set of ideas he might usefully advance,” the conservative intellectual told me. “They were unwilling to criticize him, which was never their approach to prior Republican presidents, even Ronald Reagan, and essentially forced their scholars to endorse whatever the administration was doing or else keep quiet.”
Kay James, who became president in 2018, made efforts to restrain some of these excesses, but to little avail. Heritage viewed its role as assisting Trump in his transformation of the right, to the point that by the end of Trump’s first term, Heritage was doing all it could to
provide cover for Trump
in the aftermath of the January 6 assault on the Capitol and had
embraced
absurd conspiracy theories about a stolen election. (In 2025, Heritage put out an Orwellian
statement
after Trump issued pardons: “President Trump’s decision to pardon the January 6 defendants marks a pivotal moment in restoring the integrity of America’s justice system.”)
James left in 2021. Heritage’s new president, Kevin Roberts, pushed the institution in an even more populist, MAGA-friendly direction. By 2024, it was clear that Trump would win the GOP nomination for a second time; there would be no daylight between him and Heritage. The latter would conform to the wishes of the former, under any and all circumstances, even if it meant jettisoning conservative principles.  
Something else was happening as well. In 2021, the Heritage Foundation allowed Tucker Carlson, then the most popular cable-news host in the country, to gain a “stranglehold” over it, as the journalist Michael Warren has detailed in
The Dispatch
. As a result, according to Warren, “Heritage has institutionally abandoned many conservative principles—free enterprise, American leadership on the world stage, constitutionalism—in favor of a grab bag of positions that track both with the priorities of the Trump administration and the particular whims of Carlson.”
T
he criticisms directed
at Roberts for his defense of Carlson came from politicians, historians, and public intellectuals; from pundits, magazine editors, radio-talk-show hosts, and podcasters. It was as if a light switch had been flipped. For a moment at least, large parts of the American right wanted to publicly distance themselves from Fuentes—a white supremacist, an anti-Semite, and a defender of Hitler—and from those who promoted him. A decade into the Trump era, it turns out that there is still a faint moral pulse to be found on the right, a belief that some lines shouldn’t be crossed. Those of us who are conservative critics of Trump will take encouragement where we can find it.
But even this dim hope comes with qualifiers. For one thing, speaking out against a white nationalist who
praises Hitler
and Stalin, who says
“a lot of women want to be raped”
and who insists that segregation was
“better for them, it’s better for us,”
seems like a pretty low bar to clear.
But it’s actually worse than that. In 2022, Trump hosted Fuentes and Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, for dinner at his Mar-a-Lago resort. A source familiar with the dinner conversation
told
Axios
that Trump “seemed very taken” with Fuentes.
“There was a lot of fawning back and forth,”
Axios
reported. At one point during the dinner, Trump turned to Ye and said of Fuentes, “I really like this guy. He gets me.”
I’m sure he does.
Here’s the problem: Many of the same people who ripped Carlson for hosting a podcast with Fuentes—
Senator Ted Cruz
is one name that comes to mind—failed to criticize Trump for hosting a dinner with Fuentes. And last Sunday, Trump said he did not have a problem with Carlson interviewing Fuentes to “get the word out” so that people could make up their mind.
When asked, “What role do you think Tucker Carlson should play in the Republican Party and the conservative movement?” Trump
responded
, “Well, I found him to be good. I mean, he said good things about me over the years. He’s—I think he’s good.” Fuentes, meanwhile, sent out a four-word message on social media:
“Thank you Mr. President!”
[
Read: The firewall against Nick Fuentes is crumbling
]
Trump, then, continues to provide cover to the worst among us, and the voices of conscience who screwed up the courage to speak out against a podcaster and a Holocaust denier, and even the president of a think tank, do what they have always done, which is to shrink back when it matters most. When it comes to taking on Trump—the dark, dominant figure in MAGA world—the majority go sotto voce. That’s a fight they’d rather leave to others.
In that sense, nothing has really changed.
T
he reason
Trump has been the dominant figure in world politics for the past decade rests in part on the MAGA true believers. They have a cultlike devotion to Trump, as unshakable as anything I’ve seen in my lifetime. Their moral blindness is almost incomprehensible to me. From what I can tell, they live in a twilight zone, a place of unreason, detached from reality, at least regarding politics. It’s a world where black is white, where up is down, and where Trump is good.

But at least as responsible for the Trump era are the people who knew better, or should have known better; who had concerns about Trump but kept them to themselves; and who felt most comfortable embracing the mindset of “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” They became known as “never–never Trumpers.” They rationalized, time after time after time, their support for a man whose every part of his life is touched by corruption.
When confronted with inconvenient facts, they reject them. When Trump does cruel and wicked things, they ignore them. When they need Bible verses to justify their support for Trump, they find them. When reminded about their criticisms of Bill Clinton for his ethical lapses, they dismiss them. There is always a reason to stick with Trump, to vote for him, to justify his actions, to look the other way when needed. However bad Trump was, they assured themselves and others, the Democrats were far, far worse. And so they pulled their punches. Their ethos aligns with that of the Heritage Foundation: There are no enemies to the right.  
I long ago lost track of the number of people I know on the right who have expressed frustration with my warnings about Trump. One of them, a former Republican member of Congress who served during the Reagan era, wrote to me on December 7, 2020, after I published an article titled “
Trump’s Most Malicious Legacy
,” and told me this: “Advice from a friend. You need to liberate yourself from Trump hatred.” He wrote to me a month later, at 2:52 p.m. on January 6, 2021. This time his message was shorter: “You are validated.” A gracious note on his part, perhaps, but it was of little use as a mob of Trump supporters attacked the Capitol, chanting “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” and beating cops along the way.  
So we are where we are. Those who aided and abetted an arsonist are now expressing shock that the city is turning to ashes. The very people whose support for Trump’s reelection paved the way for the rise of what they
call
the “fascistic, neo-Nazi, radical right” are now in a panic. People who
said
, in the aftermath of Trump’s 2024 victory, that this “could be an emerging new golden age for the country” are now
warning
that the GOP is “being eaten by its radicals.” Those who were
“unbelievably relieved”
that Trump was reelected now lament
“the new radicalism racing through the young Right”
and warn that young Christians are “neck-deep in anti-Semitism.” They’ve recognized that “the Groyper thing”—a term associated with Fuentes and his followers—“has infiltrated young conservative Washington networks to a significant degree.”
Unnerved by this, some people on the right are now, belatedly, trying to draw boundaries. And that includes those who, to their credit, have broken with Trump at times in the past. But what boundaries can you effectively draw when the movement you are part of has for a decade embraced the most unethical and transgressive political figure in American history?
M
artin Niemöller
was a German theologian and Lutheran pastor. In 1920, after having served in World War I, he decided to follow the path of his father into the ministry and began seminary training at the University of Münster.
Niemöller’s sermons reflected his politics, which were strongly nationalist. The year that Hitler came to power, 1933, he wrote that the Weimar Republic had been “years of darkness.” Hitler would lead a national revival, Niemöller
believed
. The führer would return Germany to Christian morals, act as a bulwark against secularism, and usher in a new and glorious era.
But Niemöller, despite holding anti-Semitic views, soon broke with the
Deutsche Christen
, or “German Christians,” a pro-Nazi faction within the German Protestant Church, because of their interference in Church matters and attacks on “non-Aryan” Church members. In 1934, he helped create the
Confessing Church
, an anti-Nazi alternative to the state Church. His opposition to the Nazi regime’s control of the Church led to his arrest several times, and he was eventually sent to concentration camps in Sachsenhausen and Dachau and a camp in Tyrol, Austria, where he was liberated by American troops in 1945.
His imprisonment by the Nazis was an inflection point; in 1945, he was a prominent figure in the creation of the
Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt
, which confessed the Church’s collective guilt for its insufficient opposition to the Nazi regime.
[
Yair Rosenberg: The MAGA influencers rehabilitating Hitler
]
In a sermon a year later, Niemöller
said
, “We must openly declare that we are not innocent of the Nazi murders, of the murder of German communists, Poles, Jews, and the people in German-occupied countries.” This guilt, he continued, “lies heavily upon the German people and the German name, even upon Christendom. For in our world and in our name have these things been done.”
In that same year, 1946, Niemöller shared words that would soon become immortalized. “First they came for the socialists and I did not speak out, because I was not a socialist,” he
said
. “Then they came for the trade unions and I did not speak out, because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out, because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.”
A
merica is not Nazi Germany
and Trump is not Hitler. But one can act in ways that are a good deal less malevolent than the Nazis and still do an awful lot of harm. Niemöller’s words can apply to nations quite different from Germany in the 1930s and ’40s. And Niemöller’s warning about passivity and indifference, about the dangers of silence and inaction in the face of injustice, about going along to get along and speaking out too late, is enduring.
The Trump era is far from over. There will be many more occasions on which American conservatives will face Niemöller’s test, and be asked whether they have the courage to stand opposed to Nazism and Hitler apologists. And those who criticized Carlson and Fuentes this time will have the chance to speak out again, and to speak out against the president for the first time. Perhaps condemning his
call
for the death of Democratic lawmakers could be a good place to start.

It may or may not be too late to salvage the American right and the Republican Party. But it’s never too late to speak against cruelty and lawlessness, and to speak up for justice and compassion and human dignity.
One word of truth shall
outweigh
the whole world.