The attack on the Heritage Foundation is an attack on MAGA

It’s Thursday morning as I write. Has The Wall Street Journal weighed in with another attack on Kevin Roberts yet, the besieged president of the Heritage Foundation? No? Be patient. It’s early hours yet. Another fusillade is due any minute. 

I have written about that tempest-in-a-teapot myself. I agree that Roberts’s brief video statement defending the Heritage Foundation’s friendship with Tucker Carlson was ill-advised. I say why in that column. I also think that his efforts at damage control have been ineffective. But given the incontinent fury of the response to that two-minute and thirty-nine-second video, I am not sure that anyone could have calmed the storm.  

The more the mob rages, however, the more I suspect that – to adapt a famous saying of Saul Alinsky– the issue is not the issue. It’s not really Tucker Carlson and his curious ideas about chem trails, Area 51, the baddies in World II, or the state of Israel. It’s not even Nick Fuentes, the hectoring twenty-seven-year-old anti-Semite and political performance artist whom Carlson recently treated to a long and pillow-plump interview.  

The key that unlocks the agenda in this controversy is contained in the phrase “proxy war.” The prime targets are not Kevin Roberts or Tucker Carlson.  They are expendable cutouts for the real villain, the Make America Great Agenda of Donald Trump.  

This is something that John Daniel Davidson touches on in a recent column in The Federalist. “Genuine concern about anti-Semitism on the right is being hijacked by neocons to attack J.D. Vance in hopes of retaking control of the GOP.”

Oh, for the days of George Bush and Mitt Romney! Can we get them back?  Only a few days ago, it was reported that Mike Pence is tanned, rested, and ready for 2028. 

We can draw a veil over that particular farce. Rest assured, Mike Pence will not be moralizing from the White House. But what entities like The Wall Street Journal long for is a return to a Pence-like “normality” and “Conservative, Inc.” The deep state missed taking down Trump when he ran in 2016. He was supposed to be toast, but somehow he prevailed. Then the Russia Collusion delusion was supposed to destroy him but failed. Then, when the 2024 election lumbered into sight, the establishment thought it had mounted a devastating first strike against Trump and his populist agenda. Jack Smith, Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, Fanny Willis, ninety-something indictments partisan judges and lawfare as far as the eye could see. Amazingly, it didn’t work.

Now those forces are piggy-backing on the campaign against anti-Semitism to take more shots against MAGA. The ironies abound.  For one thing, when it comes to anti-Semitism, the Heritage Foundation under Kevin Roberts has been close to a model citizen. You haven’t heard that in the many attacks on Roberts, but it is true. The case was well put by Victoria Coates, a Heritage scholar and national security expert, in a letter the WSJ deigned to publish on November 6 under the title “Heritage Always Stands Against Anti-Semitism.”  

The prime targets are not Kevin Roberts or Tucker Carlson.  They are expendable cutouts for the real villain, the Make America Great Agenda of Donald Trump.  

“In the days after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel,” Coates notes, “Heritage hosted one of the first public events to condemn the terrorism and the blatant anti-Semitism it unleashed.”

“Shortly thereafter we created the National Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism to help coordinate the efforts of like-minded organizations.

In October 2024, we launched Project Esther, an initiative to combat anti-Semitism in the U.S. through legal and legislative remedies. This effort has found allies across the political spectrum and raised awareness among the general public and the Trump administration of the immediate threat that left-wing anti-Semitism poses to America’s Jews and the US… The Davis Institute for National Security, which I lead, focuses on defeating antisemitism, as do our colleagues in the domestic-policy and legal departments.”

Coates, I should add, is the author of The Battle for the Jewish State: How Israel and America Can Win, which I recently published at Encounter Books.  

There is a certain grubby pleasure in identifying a candidate for ostracism and then joining the crowd in shouting an approved list of imprecations. This is especially true when an adjacent issue provides moral cover, as the charge of antisemitism does here. 

Hannah Arendt noted in The Origins of Totalitarianism, the growth of anti-Semitism in a society is always a bad sign, a canary in the mine of social and political comity. The oddity in this case is that Kevin Roberts, far from approving or abetting anti-Semitism, has been exemplary in attacking it.