The Heritage Foundation, Groypers, and the Narcissism of Small Differences

MAGA’s favorite think tank, the Heritage Foundation, is reportedly in the midst of a conservative Civil War after Heritage president Kevin Roberts defended Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with the white supremacist Nick Fuentes.

For readers not steeped in the nuances of the internet’s competing racist factions, Fuentes is a neo-Nazi podcaster and streamer—host of America First—whose political star is rapidly rising. Calling Fuentes a neo-Nazi is not hyperbolic. He’s a Holocaust denier who claims to “love Hitler.” Fuentes began his political career palling around with white supremacists at the neo-Nazi “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. His long march from the far-right fringe to conservative mainstream has been helped along by rising antisemitism, the movement’s increasingly-open embrace of gutter racism, and a cadre of zealous young followers whose political ideology was forged in white supremacist chat rooms (they call themselves “groypers” after an alt-right meme). Fuentes hopes to bring the GOP “kicking and screaming into the future, into the right wing, into a truly reactionary party” by replacing Burkean traditionalism with his personal brand of white supremacist vanguardism.

Carlson’s interview with Fuentes on October 27^th, was full of Nazi fan service, with Fuentes railing against “organized Jewry in America” and claiming that the fascist anti-immigrant crackdown in Chicago was not brutal enough. Calling the interview an “epochal moment for American conservatism,” Vox’s Zack Beauchamp argued the sit-down with Carlson brings Fuentes closer to conservative power centers and ultimately achieving his reactionary goals.

Kevin Roberts has come under fire from conservatives for defending the interview, including from MAGA stalwarts. In his statement, Roberts attempted to thread a needle, claiming to oppose a nebulous notion of “cancellation” while condemning some of Fuentes’ most over-the-top statements. But Fuentes’ open Nazism isn’t an ideological deviation. Fuentes is the logical heir to the antisemitic “great replacement” conspiracy theory Carlson spent years popularizing at Fox.

GOP Yesterday-men like Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz expressed outrage over the interview, with Cruz calling those who don’t push back against antisemitism “complicit in that evil.” On X, McConnell claimed his party should not “carry water for antisemites and apologies for America-hating autocrats.” McConnell ignored the irony in posting against antisemitism on app run by the world’s richest antisemite (and top GOP donor). But McConnell also noted that perhaps “he doesn’t know what time it is” and this observation couldn’t be more apt. Overseeing the GOPs transformation into an ever more radical party, McConnell excused the party’s increasingly open bigotry. Now, faced with the monster he created, McConnell pleads ignorance. Ben Shapiro claimed that Robert’s defense of Carlson is a “betrayal of the Heritage Foundation’s history and principle.”

But Fuentes’ politics are not a betrayal of the Heritage Foundation’s principles, they are their culmination. Fuentes is the fly born of Heritage’s maggot: the next stage in the life cycle of hateful politics motivating Roberts and the wider conservative movement. Heritage’s battle over antisemitism is, as Noah Berlatsky claims, better thought of as a fight over “which Jews to hate.”  Despite research showing antisemitism is more prevalent on the right, Project Esther—the Heritage Foundation’s antisemitism task force—ignored right-wing antisemitism and hoped to undermine pro-Palestine movement and broader left by conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism.   

In other words, the conservative “Civil War” is being waged over the narcissism of small differences. The Heritage Foundation, Carlson, and Fuentes are all part of a singular White Christian Nationalist movement hoping to make America great again by restricting the rights of people of color, rolling back the feminist movement’s victories, and cheer-leading authoritarianism. Heritage, through Project 2025, served as a kind of government-in-waiting between the first and second Trump administration. Heritage created the intellectual blueprint for the administration’s assault on American democracy. They agree on movement goals of terrorizing immigrants, firing Black people, and controlling unruly women. They differ over the method and means to these ends.

Political coalitions definitionally band together despite disagreements. Differences of opinion, strategy, and ideology often flare into open conflicts. But what ultimately holds a coalition together are areas of agreement. During the civil rights movement, White Citizens’ Councils and the Ku Klux Klan were both part of a broad white supremacist movement dedicated to ensuring “segregation forever.” Klan members—willing to protect white dominance at any cost—saw firebombing churches and murdering children as viable strategies. White Citizen’s Councils, in contrast, were often peopled by middle class doctors, lawyers, and business owners who saw violence as low-class and potentially harmful for business. Images of dead little girls and bombed-out churches might backfire, rallying squishy liberals to civil rights causes and undermining the councils’ and Klan’s shared goals. But Jim Crow segregation was premised on violence, and every prosecutor’s refusal to charge or Klan acquittal from all-white juries was an acknowledgment of the brutality at the heart of Southern society. Despite protestations on both sides, the Councils and the Klan were ultimately brothers in hate.

The Heritage Foundation found its activist footing, in part, by figuring out exactly how much bigotry it could launder into the mainstream. In his history of conservative education reform, Adam Laats notes that Heritage found its ideological footing and became a national force by joining right-wing book banners Kanawaha county West Virginia. Over the course of 1974-75, conservative parents, and their Klan allies, terrorized the community.  To protect children from the dangers or reading about Black people, elementary schools were repeatedly bombed, buses were shot up, and the Klan burned a cross. Recognizing a cause they could support, a Heritage Foundation lawyer provided free legal advice for protestors, “encouraging them to see their cause as part of a vital national trend.” Laats is careful to note that although Heritage and other conservative organizations refused to directly cooperate with the Klan. Nonetheless, the “Klan still came to work with the protestors,” because they were on the same team.  

Contemporary conservative movement leaders similarly pretend that a hard-and-fast barrier exists between their goals and the movement’s seedier, more openly racist elements. But the Trump era—with Heritage’s support—has made the tedious illusion of a gap between thugs chanting “Jews will not replace us” and national policy influence difficult to maintain. When Trump defended the “very fine people on both sides” of Charlottesville riot, he was welcoming Fuentes—who used the rally to “begin to stake out his turf as the most outrageous voice on the right”—into the GOP fold. Trump filled his administration with people comfortable accessorizing white polo shirts with tiki torches. Steven Miller, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, began his activist career as a Duke University undergraduate, where he teamed up with future alt-right leader Richard Spencer to bring white nationalist Peter Brimelow to campus. Miller’s white nationalist fever dreams have become official policy as ICE is shooting priests, kidnapping children, and disappearing people to both foreign gulags and domestic concentration camps. The Department of Homeland Security posts white supremacist propaganda so blatant that a rational racist might think it was bad public relations.

Well before the Carlson interview, the Heritage Foundation cheered and provided material support for policies Fuentes advocates. Heritage’s contributions to the moral panic over critical race theory, their screeds against “wokeness,” laments over cancel culture, and attacks on diversity were designed to shift the Overton window away from condemnations of open bigotry. For decades, the conservative movement has relied on plausibly deniable racism communicated through dog whistles. It is not surprising that eventually, a figure would tire of all the not-so-subtle bigotry and forthrightly claim the white supremacy their movement elders kept hinting at. The notion that Fuentes’ rhetorical violence is a bridge too far, while Heritage provides the infrastructure for the administration’s actual violence, strains credulity. It is reminiscent of the Citizen’s Councils condemning Klan violence, but bailing them out and serving as their lawyers. White papers that calmly outline strategies for terrorizing immigrants or turning back civil rights may be easier to stomach than Fuentes’ open slurs but are nonetheless civility in the service of fascism.

By normalizing bigotry Heritage made a figure like Fuentes not just likely but inevitable. And many up-and-comers in the GOP seem more comfortable with Fuentes-style bullhorns than their grandparents’ dog whistles. Just weeks ago, Politico reported on a leaked group chat full of Young Republicans whose racist banter sounded like an audition tape for America First. Like Fuentes, they “loved Hitler” and were comfortable using the N-word, joked about gas chambers, and called Black Americans “watermelon people.” The chats included a plot proposing to tar a political opponent by claiming he was part of an open white supremacist group. The plan was ultimately rejected when they reasoned that membership in an explicit white supremacist organization might actually attract young conservative voters. That is, Young Republicans see themselves in competition with the slightly more explicit white supremacists, like Fuentes, who are willing to take their racism outside of the group chat.

Upon learning about the chats, Fuentes recognized kindred spirits, claiming “There's groypers in government, there's groypers in every department, every agency, OK?” Fuentes’ is self-aggrandizing, so he’s likely exaggerating the extent of groyper infestation in the Federal government. But the groypers who have successfully infiltrated federal agencies are likely implementing plans written by the Heritage Foundation.  

Featured image is The Ku Klux Klan at Harvard