Fringe-Facing Figures Will Doom the Right
The Kevin Roberts video is just a symptom of the larger disease
Robin Williams as Mrs. Doubtfire (20th Century Fox, 1993)
The comedy whose protagonist has constructed a double life always ends the same. The two lives collide, the accelerating tempo of accent switches, costume changes, and backstory confusion reaches an uproarious crescendo, and disaster ensues. Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, has found the experience less than amusing.
The problem with his now infamous video statement (full text below) is not that he chose to defend Tucker Carlson for interviewing neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes. If he had made a good-faith argument for engagement with even the most offensive speakers, many would have disagreed but nearly all would have shrugged and moved on. The problem was that Roberts said virtually nothing in defense of his friend. Instead, he made the case for circling wagons on the Right regardless of the merits, and went on offense against an unnamed venomous coalition loyal to a foreign country for sowing division among Christians loyal to Christ.
Attempting to perform in his role as credible conservative leader, he accidentally deployed the worldview, strategy, and rhetoric of his side gig as a cheerleader for fever-swamp extremism. One thinks of Robin Williams as Mrs. Doubtfire, standing in front of his family at the restaurant, the mask literally slipping from his face.
I don’t care about Fuentes, but I care deeply about the danger posed to the conservative movement by a political environment that promotes these stunts and disfigures the right-of-center coalition. I hope the meltdown will prompt some introspection, about the costs of performative provocation, the folly of “no enemies to the Right,” and the desperate need for institutional leadership that provides a positive vision and leads toward it.
The thing about Roberts is that he actually makes outlandish, inflammatory, counterproductive statements with some regularity. “Do you believe that President Biden won the 2020 election?” the New York Times asked him early last year. “No.” Could he explain why? Well, “I don’t know the outcome, but that’s why I can’t say yes definitively … so let’s move on.”
He was on fire, middle of last year, calling for a “second American revolution” (“bloodless if the Left allows it to be,” he generously clarified) and preparing to publish a book subtitled “Burning Down Washington to Save America” with a match waiting to be lit on the cover. Then we had an honest-to-God near-assassination of a presidential candidate and the Robespierre cosplay wasn’t so fun anymore. Time to delay release of the book. New cover. New subtitle.
On X, the same week that he posted his video, he also called a campus speaker a “patriot” for telling a room full of College Republicans, “there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people in this country who would kill you for just being in this room” (obviously false). He warned that those on the Left “hate our country” (some do, most don’t) and that “liberal European democracies” are “adversaries in a civilizational conflict.” Lest one think that’s just the same sentiment expressed by Vice President J.D. Vance in Munich, Vance’s own words were, “I fundamentally believe that we are on the same team.”
The comments by Roberts on Carlson and Fuentes were, in other words, simply the same divisive, nonsensical gasoline, aimed at impressing a narrow constituency, poured onto a sufficiently hot and prominent surface that it blew up in his face.
Of course, Roberts is hardly alone in his habit. An entire ecosystem within the conservative movement traffics in coy transgression, irresponsibly courting the radical fringe and engaging impressionable youngsters who don’t know any better while trying to maintain plausible deniability when confronted. What’s a little monarchism, race science, and misogyny among friends?
In theory, to quote Roberts, “when we disagree with a person’s thoughts and opinions, we challenge those ideas and debate.” But in practice, as his next sentence clarifies, “we have seen success in this approach as we continue to dismantle the vile ideas of the Left.” And only the Left. Vile ideas on the Right see little challenge—wouldn’t want to “sow division,” after all, like the Jews, sorry, like that venomous coalition of globalists serving another country’s agenda. When you spend enough time in the fever swamp, even if you think you’re just hanging out on the bank, that is how you find yourself talking.
There is no upside. The “edgelords” who take pride in transgression for its own sake and chase clicks and engagement online, offending people for fun and profit, are not valued or necessary members of a functional political coalition. They are unreliable and unpleasant. Their arguments are bad, their conduct pathetic. They have no commitment themselves to coalition building, no interest in the mainstream appeal necessary to winning and effectively exercising power, no idea how to govern or toward what constructive ends. I cannot think of a single member of this class who has contributed important ideas to modern conservatism or become a constructive and persuasive participant. Their batting average is .000.
What their presence does accomplish is grievous harm to the reputations and potential of more promising political figures, who accumulate embarrassing affiliations and say foolish things. Younger activists learn the wrong lessons and face the wrong incentives, drawn toward the easy attention of provocation. Think tank presidents unwittingly beclown themselves.
The counterargument holds that conservatives must have “no enemies to the Right,” one of the more self-evidently absurd formulations that anyone in politics at least pretends to take seriously. Logically, it instantly crumbles, as Roberts helpfully illustrated. In the course of interviewing Fuentes, Carlson exclaimed that he “despises Christian Zionists more than anyone on Earth.” Roberts, surveying the scene, had before him someone attacking Jews, someone attacking Christian Zionists, and others attacking the first two. Under what rubric is the right choice to focus condemnation on the last group… indeed, “sowing division” in the process?
Compounding the problem, those enemies of conservatism to the Right feel no such obligation to keep the peace within a movement whose success is clearly not a priority. Technically, they have no one to their Right. The asymmetrical dynamic leads to political pressure on everyone else in precisely the wrong direction. Those American families trying to make ends meet aren’t to my Right, but the guy posting about Francisco Franco from his basement is, so I guess we have to go with him. In a vicious cycle, ordinary and sensible Americans are driven further away, and more from the fringe are attracted and elevated, yielding an ever narrower, increasingly radical, less responsive coalition.
Advocates for the approach point jealously to the Left. They protect their own, no matter what, the argument goes. Which may be true, for the most part, but so what? The Left’s inability to escape its own radicals is a massive liability, and one the Right gleefully mocks. No one thinks the Left benefits from its inability to jettison the transgender activists, the climate crazies, and the race hucksters. When the Left wins, it wins in spite of them. President Bill Clinton’s “Sister Souljah Moment” became legendary because it was hard, yes, but also obviously correct and enormously effective.
These problems were all entirely foreseeable—indeed, I spent a lot of time last year trying to talk about them. Delivering the annual First Things lecture in Washington, hosted at the Heritage Foundation, I said:
The West’s track record when it predicates governance on the resolution of intra-Christian disputes is not good. Competing religious claims tend to be less justiciable than empirical ones, except by raw power politics, which historically has meant war.
…
Our cupboard is so bare that young men are filling auditoriums to hear Jordan Peterson tell them to clean their rooms. Pseudonymous internet personalities like Mencius Moldbug and Bronze Age Pervert offer the thrill of transgression, but not a workable vision for a political movement that has any hope of governing our country.
My presentation to young policy professionals at American Compass’s annual retreat emphasized:
· “I can say anything” does not mean “I should say anything”
· The coalition you build with nastiness is not a good one
· Imputing bad motives to the other side accomplishes little
· Revolutions are bad
At the National Conservatism conference, I said:
Gaining productive power requires focusing on people’s problems and explaining how you are going to solve them, not pounding the table for “Christian Nationalism” or a “second American Revolution.” And importantly, it then requires using the power gained to in fact solve the problems—not to pivot quickly to some far-reaching ideological agenda that has nowhere near the support required for its success.
At its root, the problem is a leadership vacuum. Conservative leaders, especially, should take seriously their obligations as role models. Playing these games, refusing to confront radicals, represents an abdication. Roberts has continued his failure in the post-video fallout, pushing out his own chief of staff over the incident, then going in front of the entire organization to explain that the staffer “had the pen” and that “I understood from our former colleague that it was approved, it was signed off on by the handful of colleagues who are part of that.”
He continued, “Still my fault, I should have had the wisdom to say, ‘time out, let’s double check this.’” Let’s double check that enough other people have signed off to ensure asses are sufficiently covered? Let’s make sure no one put a question mark on the teleprompter, lest Ron Burgundy sound foolish? Or let’s actually read the text and apply critical thinking to it? That’s not a “time out” or a “double check.” That’s the fundamental responsibility of anyone making a public statement on a controversial issue. Even after reading the lines into the camera, he still had time for reflection before the video went online. He must have mentally processed the words he was speaking. Was he gonna plagiarize the whole thing for us, as Will Hunting might ask, or does he have any thoughts of his own on this matter?
I have emphasized instrumental concerns here—what is good politics, good for coalition building, heck, good for people’s own work and ambitions—because the arguments on the other side are instrumental. No one makes a substantive case for playing footsie with hateful morons. The claim is that we have no choice, this is what some group wants, this is good for the team, look what the other side does, and so on. Then, like Roberts, gesture vaguely to the value of free speech and debate and the evils of cancellation before hiding as far from any real debate as possible. So it’s important to recognize that those calculations are simply the wrong ones, they are driven by laziness and cowardice rather than clear-eyed assessment of what is possible and what is necessary, and they lead directly away from the kind of personal and political success that everyone professes to want.
But of at least equal importance, the argument against demonizing other groups and ginning up baseless fear that they all hate us, against undermining our democratic protections and processes and values, is a moral one: What you are doing is wrong. True, it will not succeed. But even if it did succeed, the result would not be a nation conducive to human flourishing. The themes we should be focusing on, the conversations we should be having, are about understanding and addressing the real problems important to ordinary American families. As conservatives, we are called to start from that foundation. Leaders are called to provide a positive vision and to persuade, not chase the crowd wherever they might think it’s headed.
What kind of America do most Americans want to live in, and what kind of coalition do we need to build to achieve that vision? Those questions should shape the conservative movement’s work. (Hint: They want a pluralistic democracy in which they can build decent lives and raise healthy families in strong communities.) Leaders who instead serve themselves and their friends, pursue their personal priorities and preferences, and tear at the nation’s social fabric in the process are no better than the elites who they accuse of having driven the country off course. If the New Right falls into that trap, it will be nothing new at all.
Statement by Kevin Roberts (released via X on October 30, 2025):
I’ll have more to say about this in the coming days, but today I want to be clear about one thing: Christians can critique the state of Israel without being antisemitic. And of course, antisemitism should be condemned. My loyalty as a Christian and as an American is to Christ first and to America always.
When it serves the interest of the United States to cooperate with Israel and other allies, we should do so with partnerships on security, intelligence, and technology. But when it doesn’t, conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class or from their mouthpieces in Washington.
The Heritage Foundation didn’t become the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement by canceling our own people or policing the consciences of Christians, and we won’t start doing that now. We don’t take direction from comments on X, though we are grateful for the robust free speech debate. We also don’t take direction from members or donors, though we are inherently grateful for their support, and we’re adding more every day. This is the robust debate we invite, with our colleagues, our movement friends, our members, and the American public.
We will always defend truth. We will always defend America. And we will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda. That includes Tucker Carlson, who remains and, as I have said before, always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation.
The venomous coalition attacking him are sowing division. Their attempts to cancel him will fail. Most importantly, the American people expect us to be focusing on our political adversaries on the Left, not attacking our friends on the Right. I disagree with, and even abhor, things that Nick Fuentes says, but canceling him is not the answer either. When we disagree with a person’s thoughts and opinions, we challenge those ideas and debate. And we have seen success in this approach as we continue to dismantle the vile ideas of the Left.
As my friend Vice President Vance said last night, “What I am not okay with is any country coming before the interest of American citizens. And it is important for all of us, assuming we are American citizens, to put the interest of our own country first.” That’s where our allegiance lies, and that’s where it will stay.
Never underestimate the damage a Tucker Carlson can do to our fragile coalition, by a near miracle cobbled together with people as different as Trump, Vance, Kennedy, Gabbard, and Musk. Things could have gone differently and they just might in the future.
When elections are decided by only a percent or two, intemperate talk can sideline enough voters to change the outcomes. I think an incestuous tribe of podcasters who won’t stand up for decency “because they’re my friends” are, in the words of George Carlin, are part of a big club… we aren’t in it.
This was a mostly excellent piece by Oren. I've forwarded the same critiques and come to the same conclusions coming from the nominal left. As an economically oriented progressive I'm very much in support of the aims and general thrust of Oren's agenda. It is unequivocally a progressive economic agenda in the original meaning of that term.
I view the narrow identity groups that have been assigned to "the left" as fundamentally negative. All the left groups have some level of legitimate concern. But those are not progressive concerns in that progressive issues are properly, the economic concerns of the working class. Further, I have a problem in general with narrow claims of injustice that fail to broadly support justice for all. Narrow identity groups support only their issue and rely on weaponization of victimhood rather than broad concepts of justice that should apply to everyone. This is true of both "left" and "right" groups.
The appeal of what Oren is trying to marshal is a broad application of justice: the material well being of the working class. It is the same goal and appeal as the real progressives. When most pundits talk about moving to "the Center" they are wrong about what the Center is or what it wants. I believe pundits and most politicians generally work to define the center in useless or inaccurate ways to confuse and obfuscate. Economic progressive policy IS the Center. It is what conservative Voters and liberal Voters all Have in Common. Everybody wants material security in work, healthcare and retirement and to live healthy lives and raise healthy children. Because of our nature as primates that, of necessity, means healthy families and communities.
"No enemies to the right" and "Democrats are evil" both are ideas that absolutely are the work of the financial elite. They are the mirror of Defund the Police or MeToo. I am asserting that because the result of those movements is to maintain the status quo politically. The status quo Is division. The status quo radically benefits the financial elite. Policy that favors corporate power generally moves forward while worker agency moves backward or sideways. The status quo divides the Center, the real center.
From that perspective I have to question the utility of Oren developing progressive economic policy as "conservative" policy. I understand my own assertion of that policy as "progressive" suffers the same problem. Which is it hews to the very social identities that divide the Center. Some kind of unification or perhaps even a new separate name for a party or movement that is focused on the Center, what unites the vast majority of voters, and considers other issues secondary and to be assessed using the broadest sense of justice would be an actual way forward.
On the other hand getting conservative voters a politically/socially palatable option for progressive economic policy could make that policy become more front and center as a policy agenda. When that is a main agenda for conservative voters, rather than owning libs, voters might be able to support politicians who actually want to help the working class. I think the folly of narrow self radicalizing identity politics is being apprehended by left leaning voters and politicians. I'm hopeful we'll see a lot more Marie GluesenKamp-Perez's in both parties or forming a new party. And a renewal of Sanders's movement before it was hijacked by BLM and the other Alphabet jumbles and acrimoniousnyms. When it was about actual workers and reducing corporate power.
The current administration is an incoherent fiasco and needs to end. My hope is the pendulum will swing to the Real Center and not to the Democrat establishment status quo. If conservative independents articulating an economic progressive agenda ran along with progressive independents articulating the same agenda we could see a genuine realignment of voter power; actual agency for the working class. That is the goal, yes?