The Decline and Fall of the Heritage Foundation

Its descent into conspiracy-mongering and blatant bigotry was utterly predictable

Pepe the frog, a Groyper symbol

There’s deep turmoil at the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing “think tank” that calls itself “America’s most influential policy organization,” and is responsible for Project 2025. I’ll explain the scare quotes in a minute.

As many readers know, Tucker Carlson recently invited Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist who espouses antisemitic conspiracy theories, onto his podcast. This was shocking but not surprising: It has been obvious for a long time that virulent antisemitism was a growing force within the American right, especially among young people. Last month Politico reported on the contents of private chats between a number of Young Republican leaders that include declarations that “I love Hitler,” jokes about gas chambers, and more.

So should it come as a surprise that Kevin Roberts, Heritage’s president, put out a video defending Carlson and attributing the uproar to “the globalist class,” a turn of phrase routinely used to attack Jews?

It was clearly a surprise to Roberts that his defense of Carlson provoked a widespread backlash. And displaying the complete refusal to accept responsibility we’ve come to expect from leading conservatives, Roberts now claims that he was just reading a script written by an aide, saying “I didn’t know much about this Fuentes guy.” He explained his ignorance by saying “I actually don’t have time to consume a lot of news. I consume a lot of sports.”

Yeah, right.

Why did Roberts weigh in on the Carlson-Fuentes controversy? He obviously felt he needed to express support for the right of conservatives to be conspiracy-theory antisemites -- despite the fact that Heritage itself has an antisemitism task force. Unsurprisingly, many of the task force members have now resigned.

Media reporting on this story has been excellent and revealing. However, I believe that much of the commentary misjudges the true nature of Heritage, portraying it as a genuine think tank that picked the wrong leader or was corrupted by MAGA.

Because the truth is that Heritage has always been a fraud. It has always been a propaganda mill cosplaying as a research institution – a scam that worked for a long time. Heritage’s problem now is that its original scam was designed for a different era — a Reaganesque era in which plutocrats could discreetly leverage bigotry and intolerance to elect Republicans, who then delivered deregulation and tax cuts. Heritage was an integral cog within this scheme, giving superficial respectability to policies that were in fact deeply regressive and discriminatory, and overwhelmingly to the benefit of the moneyed class.

I first began paying serious attention to Heritage early in my New York Times career, when I was writing about rising inequality. At the time Heritage was leading the charge in the campaign to eliminate the estate tax, making it easier to inherit very large fortunes.

Heritage’s position wasn’t surprising. What I did find surprising was its decision to present the estate tax as a massive burden on small businesses and farms, which was simply a lie. In 2004 only around 300 small businesses and farms owed any estate tax at all. No, I’m not missing zeroes. And the number has gone down over time. These days basically no small businesses or farms pay the tax.

So Heritage wasn’t doing research. It was just pumping out dishonest propaganda.

Another Heritage moment came in 2011, when it released widely ridiculed projections about the effects of Paul Ryan’s budget proposals. (Remember him?) Again, Heritage was in the business of producing propaganda on behalf of the 1 percent, not doing genuine economic research.

But telling lies on behalf of the wealthy isn’t enough in the MAGA era. To be a right-winger in good standing you also have to be a sexist, a racist, and an antisemite, while promoting Qanon and other conspiracy theories.

You can see the devolution of Heritage in its choices of chief economist.

Back in 2014 Heritage hired Stephen Moore, who has had a remarkable career in the right-wing universe, repeatedly landing plum jobs despite his utter incompetence. I’m not being hyperbolic here: He has repeatedly shown an almost pathological inability to get facts and numbers right. But he hasn’t, as far as I know, promoted racism and bigotry. And to his credit, he severed his connection with Heritage after the Carlson/Fuentes scandal broke.

Today, Heritage’s chief economist is E.J. Antoni, whom Donald Trump tried to install as head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after firing the previous head because he didn’t like a weak jobs report. Antoni is, if anything, even less competent than Moore. But he still might have gotten the job if Wired and CNN hadn’t uncovered his since-deleted Twitter account. As CNN put it,

President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics operated a since-deleted Twitter account that featured sexually degrading attacks on Kamala Harris, derogatory remarks about gay people, conspiracy theories, and crude insults aimed at critics of President Donald Trump … The account posted at least five sexually suggestive tweets implying that then Sen. Kamala Harris had advanced her career through sexual favors.

Incidentally, when I first read the CNN report, I somehow missed this passage:

He also repeatedly tweeted that liberal economist Paul Krugman was a pedophile, a smear for which there is no evidence – and one he also hurled at former President Joe Biden and former FBI director James Comey. [Emphasis added]

As they say, every accusation by the modern right is really a confession.

Antoni didn’t get the BLS job, but Heritage still lists him as its chief economist. What this tells us is that under Roberts Heritage was already becoming Groyperized, that is, taken over by the racist and antisemitic movement Fuentes represents. What Roberts did in that video wasn’t out of character, either for him or for the institution he runs. His only mistake was pulling back the curtain too soon.

Again, it’s important to get the story of Heritage correct, because it is also the story of the modern right as a whole. Heritage was never a respectable institution doing honest research. It was always in the business of telling lies on behalf of its wealthy supporters. But now it’s trying to turn itself into a MAGA/Groyper institution, less focused on telling economic lies and more focused on bigotry and conspiracy theories.

And if this shocks and surprises you, well, you just weren’t paying attention.

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