I changed my mind about Kevin Roberts. Here’s why.

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Nov 08, 2025

The Right has blown up these last two weeks. You would think it would be because of the shellacking we took at the polls on Tuesday. But no. It’s because of Nick Fuentes.

Actually, that is not true. It was not Fuentes himself that caused the eruption. It was not even Tucker Carlson’s ridiculously softball interview of Fuentes. It was that video by Heritage Foundation leader Kevin Roberts, backing Tucker to the hilt, no questions asked.

As it happens, I woke up to the Fuentes interview in my YouTube algorithm in a hotel room in Washington, DC on October 28th, where I was a panelist at an event marking the 60th anniversary of Nostra Aetate, the Vatican II document that is the foundation of Catholic-Jewish friendship in the modern era. Had I written this column two weeks ago, or even a few days ago, it would be a very different column. Smacking Kevin Roberts around for defending the Tucker interview has become something of a sport these last few weeks and my commentary on it would have been indistinguishable from the ones you have probably already read.

Before we get to my change of mind, let’s stipulate a few things.

First, Nick Fuentes is, as Rod Dreher summarized it,

a short, weird livestreamer [who] is an open admirer of Hitler, a Holocaust denier, an antisemite, a misogynist (he has said that women want to be raped), and a white supremacist. These are not accusations leveled at him from the Left. He takes transgressive pleasure in saying these things.

Second, Tucker Carlson was wrong to platform Fuentes, and to not challenge him, for the reasons Ben Shapiro laid out in this brutal episode of his podcast.

Third, Kevin Roberts was wrong to attack critics of Tucker’s interview of Fuentes. This is where the rubber hits the road. As loathsome as Fuentes is, and as worrying as his growing popularity among the young is, no reasonable person considers Fuentes to be a legitimate voice of the Right. As Shapiro says, even Tucker Carlson’s popularity (among, well, people like me) is due mostly to his Fox News days. The farther away he gets from those days—and the more he platforms Holocaust-denying cranks—the more that popularity will be tested.

But the Heritage Foundation? They are—as Roberts and others noted—the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement, going back a generation. Robert’s video runs less than three minutes and there is nothing wrong with half of it. He said one can critique Israel without being antisemitic, that antisemitism should be condemned and that he abhors Fuentes’ comments. All good stuff. It’s the other half of the message—that Tucker’s critics are bad actors, a “venomous coalition” seeking to “cancel” him, that Heritage will always be on Tucker’s side no matter how crazy he gets—that landed Roberts in hot water. You expect Fuentes—even, increasingly to some extent, Tucker—to be wacky. But Heritage is the granddaddy of an intellectual conservatism that affects change in the real world. For Heritage to lose the very backbone of which Roberts spoke, in the face of a growing acceptance of racism and antisemitism on the young right, would be huge.

Here’s the thing, though. That did not happen. What happened instead since that initial video is that Kevin Roberts, the Heritage Foundation, and the conservative movement more broadly showed that its backbone is still very much in place. I am not privy to any internal doings at Heritage. But enough of those doings have been leaked to the news that, coupled with later public statements, it’s clear that the Right’s natural antibodies against antisemitism, and against antisemitism’s apologists, kicked in pretty quickly. (Would that the Left’s would similarly kick in—if they have any!)

There has been a shuffling of the deck at Heritage. Some people—including some advisors who may had a hand in Roberts’ initial misstep—are no longer there. Roberts himself has issued several apologies and clarifications.

Which is why there is something strange in the continuing criticism of Roberts at this point. As Barton Swaim opined, correctly, this whole thing has been “Kevin Roberts’ Useful Blunder.” It caused Republican politicians to denounce Carlson and Fuentes. The mainstream press was forced to cover it. We learned that popular podcasters do not equal an ideological takeover. By contrast, there is no policing of the far worse antisemitism of the left, which has taken over college campuses and has occasionally spilled into violence.

Roberts is on board with all of this. So why the continued hostility toward him? And why a leak to the press to cancel some poor kid at Heritage who said attending a Shabbat dinner would conflict with his Traditionalist Catholic faith?

Unlike the podcasters, Trump really did engineer a takeover of the party. And Kevin Roberts is the guy who aligned the Heritage Foundation with Trump-Vance, with MAGA. But MAGA is a departure from the pre-Trump GOP. Less interventionist in its foreign policy, less libertarian in its economics. There are those—the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page is one of them—who are unhappy with that direction. Is the continuing animosity toward Roberts for his admitted error in the Tucker/Fuentes matter really a proxy for neocon dissatisfaction with Heritage’s Trumpy direction under Roberts? It’s beginning to look like it.

Again, I’m with the critics of Roberts’ Oct. 30th video. Yes, criticizing Israel does not make one antisemitic. But when those criticisms are filled with rantings about Jewish influence and Jewish conspiracies, and on and on, then yeah, we are in “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” territory.

But I’m also MAGA, an America-Firster. The continued attack on Roberts seems to me an attempt to show that you can’t be those things without being antisemitic. The way Heritage has snapped back from “Roberts’ Useful Blunder”—a snapback that includes Roberts himself—shows you can. So I’m on Team Roberts.